A haunting novel that’s both tough and delicate and fulfills the promise of the author’s first.
In Hayton’s (Found, Near Water, 2014, etc.) latest novel, a 14-year-old New Zealand girl, dead for 10 years, tells the story of how her body came to lie beneath a half-finished house.
Three years after a 2011 earthquake in Christchurch, rebuilding is still ongoing. Workers lift a home off its foundation to repair the cracked earth beneath, and Daina Harrow describes workers exposing her skeletal remains: “Broken along a prior instability. That’s where I am,” she says. In explaining what led up to her death, Daina tells what initially seems like a familiar story: a neglectful, single alcoholic mother; poverty; bullying students; clueless adults. Readers may think it easy to guess at how she winds up where she’s found—but author Hayton, as she did in her excellent first novel, complicates her story well beyond the predictable. (Christine Emmett, the main character of Found, Near Water, even makes a tangential appearance here.) Daina undergoes physical mistreatment, but she also begins having hallucinations: the colors of her face run, and she can taste sounds. Are her friends poisoning her? Is she going crazy? What really happened when she was 5 years old? And can she trust the Grey Man, who assigns her daunting tasks? With courage, intelligence, and resourcefulness, Daina tries to do what’s right. Her story fully comes together only on the final page, and Hayton does a masterful job of keeping the pieces in play before then. In some superficial respects, the novel resembles Alice Sebold’s 2002 bestseller, The Lovely Bones, which is also narrated by a dead 14-year-old girl, but Hayton’s sensibility is tougher-minded, more honest, and stranger. Daina’s bitterness, her longing to be seen and known, and her helplessness are strikingly, utterly real; in some ways, she’s already a ghost before she’s dead. As in her earlier novel, the author makes fruitful use of the Christchurch earthquake as a metaphor: disruption is violent but revealing. Her characterization is quick and effective but also thoughtful, avoiding stereotype; the school admissions secretary, for example, who at first seems a spiteful martinet, turns out to have surprising heart and grit.
A haunting novel that’s both tough and delicate and fulfills the promise of the author’s first.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2015
ISBN: 978-0473309268
Page Count: 266
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 13, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
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
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
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