A sensitive study of a woman choreographing her own recovery.
The art of falling isn’t hard to master, Penelope Sparrow discovers, when she wakes up in the hospital after a 14-story plunge that ended with her body colliding with Marty Kandelbaum’s car.
Remembering the fall is too dangerous. Remembering means facing the loss of Dmitri, the loss of dancing. Remembering means facing that she may have tried to commit suicide. Kandelbaum’s arrival is the first obstacle in Penny’s path toward self-wallowing. Determined to protect her from further harm, Kandelbaum brings fasnachts from his bakery, hoping food may begin the process of healing. A lifetime of being criticized for not having the stereotypical dancer’s body, however, has left Penny vigilant about every morsel that passes her lips. She doesn’t have an eating disorder, she tells herself; she simply must be careful. Her roommate at the hospital, Angela, has no such qualms. Battling cystic fibrosis, Angela embraces every pleasure life allows her. Dance critic Margaret MacArthur arrives soon after Marty. Unbeknownst to Penny, MacArthur has followed her career, and now she is certainly interested in the accident, but she is clearly also interested in something more. No matter how hard Penny tries not to recall or discuss why she fell, everything reminds her of Dmitri—their love, their partnership at Dance DeLaval, her joy in dancing his choreography—yet at the edges of her memory she sees the shadows of his rejection. While her mother and friends try to buffer Penny’s recovery, it is MacArthur’s blunt persistence that forces her to confront the damage exacted on her body and soul well before the fall. To see the truth, Penny will have to recognize the lies and rough condemnation of the dance world. Craft’s debut novel lovingly traces the aesthetics of movement and gently explores the shattering pain of despair.
A sensitive study of a woman choreographing her own recovery.Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4022-8519-6
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Sourcebooks Landmark
Review Posted Online: Sept. 17, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013
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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