Excellent work by a self-described “overnight success” who’s spent the past 40 years trying to get a novel published.
The adventures of a young lieutenant in the post–Civil War army are balanced with his sweet private life—in a debut from a Kansas-based professor near retirement age.
Lt. Michael Crofton’s young career takes him from Little Big Horn to the Zulu wars in South Africa via London and revolutionary Cuba, bringing onstage the likes of Rutherford Hayes and William Tecumseh Sherman, but there is neither grandiosity nor bombast. Coplin’s tone is so artfully unassuming and his hero, a West Point graduate from a prosperous Rhode Island family, is so genuinely modest that time flies dreamily in a tale that ends long before Crofton has worn out his welcome. And it all seems possible. As Coplin reminds us, the army in the 1870s had shrunk to 25,000, and Washington was still a small city, so the operators of the national machinery were just down the street. The very likable young Lt. Crofton’s story begins with his fortunate escape from the carnage at the detested General Custer’s last stand followed by his failure to dodge a bullet from the derringer in the hand of the breathtakingly pretty and young whore he will marry upon recovery. Leaving the skillfully sketched frontier, Crofton puts in purgatorial time sorting through army supplies with politically wired Lt. Sorenson. Sorenson’s congressional connections put the young men into the thick of an unsanctioned, possibly presidential plot to meddle in the outcome of Cuban revolutionary activities—a plot that ends as inconclusively as all Cuban plots tend to. More purgatory follows, this time in the national cemetery, and then it’s off to England through the worst of winter on a clipper ship, followed by a stint with the King’s Guards and a suicidal stand against the Zulus. As the adventures pile up, Crofton pines for his sweet young family. None of this is new, really, but it is all so fresh as narrated by the superbly modest soldier that it seems like—well—life.
Excellent work by a self-described “overnight success” who’s spent the past 40 years trying to get a novel published.Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2004
ISBN: 0-399-15112-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2003
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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
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