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FERAL, NORTH CAROLINA, 1965

Name: FERAL, NORTH CAROLINA, 1965
Author: June Sylvester Saraceno
ISBN: 978-1-970137-81-1

by June Sylvester Saraceno ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 14, 2019

A highly sensitive portrayal of a complicated country childhood that lacks cohesiveness.

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In this debut novel, an inquisitive young tomboy searches her small-town world for answers to long-held family secrets and weighty questions.

As she enters the summer season of 1965, 10-year-old Willie Mae comes to realize that she is something of an outlier in her traditional, deeply Christian family as well as in her small country town in North Carolina. Much to her mother’s chagrin, she prefers stacking wood, riding her bike, and wielding her older brother’s BB gun to playing with dolls and gushing about new dresses. She loathes Sunday school, covets transgressions, and mistrusts the religion to which her family is fervently devoted. Perhaps above all, Willie has a reputation for being a busybody and asking provocative questions when she should be minding her manners—a particularly taboo reputation for a young girl to have in her pious corner of the mid-20th-century rural South. This summer in Feral, Willie is determined to find out what killed her grand-uncle Billy, who is remembered by the family and the town as having a rather unsavory reputation. Billy was rumored to be charming and handsome but also something of a womanizer with a penchant for troublemaking. In her efforts to gather information from relatives and churchgoing acquaintances, Willie’s quest to solve this long-standing family mystery evolves into something much bigger: a gateway to coming-of-age contemplations about identity, religion, segregation, the confines of gender roles, death, and time’s ruthlessness. In this ambitious and often moving tale, Saraceno has a knack for convincingly rendering the internal experiences of a thoughtful young girl’s early encounters with imposing, big-picture questions. Further, the author’s depictions of country town summers from a bygone era are pleasurably atmospheric and her prose sparkles when she is rendering the subtleties of emotional incidents. That said, the novel reads as rather disjointed—more of a scattered collection of memories than a long-form, integrated narrative. Further, the book’s curation of recollections could have used a bit more punch at times.

A highly sensitive portrayal of a complicated country childhood that lacks cohesiveness.

Pub Date: Sept. 14, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-970137-81-1

Page Count: 144

Publisher: SFK Press

Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2020

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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SUMMER ISLAND

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2001

The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...

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Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.

Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.

The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.

Pub Date: March 1, 2001

ISBN: 0-609-60737-5

Page Count: 336

Publisher: Crown

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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LAST ORDERS

by Graham Swift ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 5, 1996

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Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.