An intense, perceptive tale of two sisters grappling with a turbulent family history.
In this debut novel, a woman learns a truth as old as literature: she can’t escape the past just by moving away and up.
This hardscrabble story opens in 1947. Maggie Coyle and her little sister, Janie, huddle outside their shabby house while their mother labors to give birth. Welcome to hell, or its suburb, Mahanoy, Pennsylvania, a coal town where their father can be found either gasping in a mine or drinking in a bar. The baby daughter is stillborn; worse, their mother then becomes catatonic. The girls are bereft. A determined Maggie vows to flee all this—the boys working in the mines and half the girls getting pregnant in high school—and seemingly does. She earns a scholarship that leads to a nursing degree and freedom. Janie, meanwhile, finds mindless work in the parish rectory. There she meets Father Timothy, a young priest with a past as troubled as the Coyle girls’. Janie bears a daughter, who’s given up for adoption (the priest never even knows that he’s the baby’s father). Meanwhile, Maggie meets a brilliant, young surgeon (with a tumultuous past, of course). They marry, have six beautiful children, and Janie comes to live with them in a big house in Philadelphia. After many years of being the greatest aunt God created, Janie contracts cancer. From here on, the story, a tale of guilt, anger, and anxious expiation, focuses on Maggie. She has a wonderful husband and children who love her. (But do they adore Aunt Janie even more?) Maggie cannot forgive herself every sin she imagines, until finally the reader wants to shake her. In lesser hands, Maggie would be almost a parody of the morally tortured martyr, but with strong writing, a wonderfully modulated pace, and tenacious introspection, the novel delivers a complex portrait. Crawford paints with a really dark palette, reflecting life’s myriad tragedies. At one point, Maggie, in a tearful conversation with her father, angrily recalls her mother: “I remember her hair. I remember brushing her hair. She’d let me and Janie do it, always telling us how good it felt...I remember you making her cry. I remember that, too.” The author knows the human heart to a scary extent. This is a remarkable debut, and readers should look forward to Crawford’s next work.
An intense, perceptive tale of two sisters grappling with a turbulent family history.Pub Date: March 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-944193-22-5
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Deeds Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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