While slowed by a dry backstory, this engaging tale transports readers to an intriguing village.
A series opener focuses on a hidden settlement in the Smoky Mountains.
Karen Karper Fredette (Where God Begins to Be, 2015, etc.) presents husband and wife Wren and Kyle Makepeace. As the novel begins, the two, both in their early 30s, are out for a hike near the Tennessee/North Carolina border. They follow an old railroad path and come across a woman named Mencie. Wren and Kyle have arrived at Lovada Cove. Mencie informs the couple that people only get to the Cove if they have been “Sent or Summoned.” It turns out the Cove is a village of sorts all on its own with homes, a church, and, thanks to some local ingenuity, reliable internet service. As Wren and Kyle learn more about this community, they also discover a great deal about themselves. Wren, who was raised by foster parents and whose middle name is Lovada, will become acquainted with her sometimes disturbing family history. Kyle, who is of Cherokee descent, will find a connection to his ancestors. Yet the couple will also learn that the Cove is in trouble. Someone even plans to tell the outside world about the settlement. The opening pages of the novel are laden with dull information about Wren and Kyle (for example, he was initially impressed by her “poise as she addressed a conference for compensatory education teachers”). Nevertheless, the pace of the story—which features black-and-white illustrations by Paul Fredette (Consider the Ravens, 2011), the author’s husband—soon picks up. The Cove is an odd enclave if ever there was one. Everything from the thickening mists capable of blocking out sound to a cat with the ability to get people to follow it adds to the vivid, otherworldly atmosphere. The story progresses with a feeling of mystery and later, when the narrative reveals someone wants to betray the Cove, a sense of urgency. Dialogue, on the other hand, tends to lack depth. For instance, Kyle proclaims awkwardly in a time of distress: “At least, let’s get clear of this place!” Yet even with such obvious sentiments, the narrative deftly takes the characters to places that both they and the audience could hardly expect.
While slowed by a dry backstory, this engaging tale transports readers to an intriguing village.Pub Date: March 7, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-72303-058-1
Page Count: 222
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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