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Remember Big

Name: Remember Big
Author: Kelly Wittmann
ISBN: 978-1483907222

by Kelly Wittmann ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 20, 2013

A colorful, nuanced novel about a golfer, his family and his choices.

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PGA golfer Charlie Matthias drops out of the circuit and moves back to his hometown in this novel about his dysfunctional family and his own life crisis.

It’s Christmastime, and 33-year-old Charlie Matthias is back living at his childhood home in an affluent Chicago suburb. He just left the PGA circuit, where he’d made money and reached midlevel success. Now, he’s questioning his life. He kicked his cocaine problem two years ago, but his wife, hometown beauty Kathleen, finally divorced him and married a rich lawyer; they just had a child. Charlie feels disconnected from his family, which includes his golf-fanatic father, who pushed Charlie into his pro career; his subservient mother, who allows herself to be ruled by Charlie’s class-conscious father; and his twin, anorexic sisters, who live together, with one of them, newly pregnant, married to crass businessman Nip. Charlie’s most drawn to his feisty grandmother, however. His sense of isolation changes when, swerving and crying while driving through Chicago, he meets up again with Erica Denner, a childhood classmate whose family now owns and lives in an apartment building in a German neighborhood. He moves into the building and is exposed to Erica’s bohemian world. They get involved, but then events unfold—with his grandmother, his father, his agent and, most significantly, Kathleen—to complicate his possible new life course. Author Wittmann effectively captures Charlie’s somewhat privileged angst, with the depiction of golf fever at the country club being at times especially amusing. Surprisingly, however, Charlie’s own relationship with the game remains murky, despite emphasis on the fact that he shares a birthday with fellow (and real-life) late bloomer Phil Mickelson. Also featured are a couple of broad strokes in plot development, including a rather extreme incident bringing Kathleen back into the picture and a sexual escapade that seems out of sync for sardonic but sensitive Charlie. Still, Wittmann admirably doesn’t “solve” all of Charlie’s problems, instead making the point that sometimes in life, you simply play through.

A colorful, nuanced novel about a golfer, his family and his choices.

Pub Date: March 20, 2013

ISBN: 978-1483907222

Page Count: 294

Publisher: CreateSpace

Review Posted Online: June 7, 2013

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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BETWEEN SISTERS

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 2003

Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...

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Sisters in and out of love.

Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?

Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.

Pub Date: May 1, 2003

ISBN: 0-345-45073-6

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Ballantine

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

by Harper Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 1960

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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.