Intense characterizations and strikingly apt imagery distinguish this lushly rhetorical first novel set in Kentucky’s coal-mining region, the work of a prizewinning short-story writer. Nearly 60 years in the lives of the Wallens of Mining Hollow are portrayed through the juxtaposed—and rather artily dreamlike—narratives of Earl Wallen, a veteran of Pearl Harbor, who ruefully describes himself thus: “Has been singer and guitar player turned coal miner”; his wife Ruth and their adult son Andrew. Ruth has had an unhappy childhood made worse when her “romantic,” ostensibly artistic mother Stella runs off, leaving Ruth alone with her father, Tobias, who becomes a fundamentalist “preacher of sorts.” His inflamed religiosity will burden her even during her married life and will eventually, ironically, reclaim her. Andrew tells (unfortunately, in wispily lyrical fashion) how he gradually, guiltily recognized his homosexuality, loved and “sinned” with a handsome boyhood friend, and passively accepts his mother’s passionate condemnation. These “strange birds”(McElmurray’s witty title has a surely unintended faintly condescending ring) are observed with scrupulously accurate period detail: the re-creation of the giddy, almost partylike atmosphere of the 1940s is especially convincing, as is the author’s vivid account of “the summer of the revival” (1962, when Andrew first feels the stirrings of same-sex love). And she contrives several effective symbolic scenes, notably the depiction of a grieving hound bitch sorrowfully circling the freshly dug grave where her malformed, lifeless newborn pups lie buried. Only infrequently, as in a badly misconceived scene in a gay drag bar, does McElmurray lose control of her novel’s tight design and emotional unity. Perhaps overindebted to such literary predecessors as Joyce Carol Oates’s early novels and William Styron’s Lie Down in Darkness, but nevertheless a strongly imagined and skillfully executed debut performance.
Pub Date: Sept. 30, 1999
ISBN: 1-892514-24-9
Page Count: -
Publisher: Hill Street
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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