The second (after Light in the Company of Women, 1994, not reviewed) in Canadian novelist Maillard's Raysburg trilogy, a series chronicling in sharp detail the clouded history and slow redemption of an unhappy child. Although the boy under consideration has been happily settled on the shores of middle age for some time before we meet him, it is obvious nevertheless that he is struggling with an unsettled past. Larry Cameron is a Boston publisher and failed geographer whose academic interest in hazard zones—that is, disaster areas— provides some clues about his own past, which was played out largely in the flood region of Raysburg, West Virginia. After a long absence, Larry is now going home for his mother's funeral, and he brings his wife Cynthia along for the ride: ``Cynthia's heard plenty about the Ohio Valley, but she's never seen it, and this unexpected chance to show it to her makes me oddly happy. Now I can't remember why I've always been so reluctant to take her to Raysburg.'' Like Larry, Cynthia never managed to complete her doctoral dissertation, but hers was in literature rather than geography—and happened to center on an obscure 19th-century novelist who lived in the small Ohio town of Massilon, only a few miles from Raysburg. As Larry arranges the funeral and looks up old friends, we glimpse the shadows of his past—his alcoholic father, his doomed younger brother, his own youthful inability to find an object for his ambitions—that drove him from Raysburg in the first place. Although—as with most trilogies—the focus is loose here, with no obvious climax or destination, the slow but continuous revelation of Larry's own past is insistent and compelling enough to draw us in, and the pattern of that same history is intricate enough to beg questions that can't be answered in one book. Graceful and fluid: A marvelous excursion into the confines of a fully realized human soul.
Pub Date: June 21, 1996
ISBN: 0-00-224397-0
Page Count: 218
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1996
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
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
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