SETTING FIRES

Name: SETTING FIRES
Author: Kate Wenner
ISBN: 0-684-83748-X

by Kate Wenner ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 2000

Wenner is a skilled writer who weaves an entertaining debut tale while offering a truthful and touching portrait of a family...

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A middle-aged woman explores the origins of a fire that guts the family’s weekend home—and comes to grips with the death of her father.

Annie Waldmas seems to have everything. A 40-year-old documentary filmmaker, she’s married to a photo researcher for the New York Times, has two smart, adorable children, lives on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, and has enough disposable income to afford a summer home in Connecticut. But when Wenner’s story opens, the family’s summer place has just gone up in smoke, the result of what the authorities call an electrical fire. To make matters worse, Annie’s controlling father, who lives on the West Coast, has just been diagnosed with stomach cancer. Annie has had her ups and downs with her father, as have her two brothers and sister, but love now wins win out, and she finds herself shuttling back and forth across the continent first to bond, then to care for her dying father. Meanwhile, she suspects that the fire could have been arson, possibly set by an anti-Semite who may be burning a swath through other nearby New England towns. But the real fires in this well-told family saga are not those that destroy wood, brick, and mortar, but those that rage in the hearts and minds of a woman struggling to make sense of a world where loss seems arbitrary and capricious. At times, the account of Annie’s father’s embrace of his imminent death—and her attempt to come to accept his loss—threatens to overcome the somewhat less interesting matter of solving a possible hate crime, but Wenner, a former 20/20 TV journalist, manages to keep things on track.

Wenner is a skilled writer who weaves an entertaining debut tale while offering a truthful and touching portrait of a family held together—and torn apart—by guilt and lies.

Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2000

ISBN: 0-684-83748-X

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Scribner

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2000

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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BETWEEN SISTERS

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 2003

Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...

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Sisters in and out of love.

Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?

Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.

Pub Date: May 1, 2003

ISBN: 0-345-45073-6

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Ballantine

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

by Harper Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 1960

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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.