A heartfelt family tale, hampered by its organizational style.
A long-suffering woman confronts more turmoil after her boyfriend kidnaps her daughter.
At the beginning of Levine’s (North of Nowhere, 2014, etc.) nonlinear novel, Marcy Travers is knocked unconscious and then wakes up in a pool of blood on the kitchen floor. Her boyfriend, Boyd, has struck her and taken her daughter, Katie, and is apparently on the run. She first met Boyd at work, where he was the janitor. At almost 7 feet tall, he came across as a gentle giant, and had become something of a stepfather to Katie. As the search for Boyd and Katie begins, the story goes back to a variety of time periods and introduces a number of different characters, including Marcy’s sister, Tanya; their mother, Jo; their foster mother, Mrs. Edmonds; and Boyd’s mother, Grace. Marcy had a tough childhood. Her mother raised her in a neighborhood of bars and liquor stores, and Marcy watched as Jo became a penniless alcoholic who at one point resorts to prostitution. Baby Tanya is abandoned at a church and eventually both she and Marcy end up in the home of Mrs. Edmonds, a stoic but somewhat stable foster mother. Separately, young Boyd is not treated well by many people; he faces bullies at school and feels very insecure about his height. In the present, Marcy tries to enlist the help of Grace in the search for Boyd and Katie while also battling her own demons. Marcy cannot forgive her mother for the past, and Jo and she wrestle with forgiveness as the hunt for Katie grows dire. Levine’s characters live in a hardscrabble universe and he does an admirable job of portraying their turbulent lives in environments that offer little compassion. Characters such as Mrs. Edmonds, who found her calling as a foster mother, or Boyd, wracked with loneliness and self-doubt, are certainly well developed. Time and place are more difficult to pin down. The novel’s small Southern town seems a bit more like a struggling Rust Belt city. Because the book jumps around often, and with no dates given, it’s unknown at the beginning of each chapter what year it is or how old the characters are, and that distraction can overwhelm a reader.
A heartfelt family tale, hampered by its organizational style.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5354-3510-9
Page Count: 244
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 28, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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