Swedish writer Ekman, author of 17 novels, debuts in English with this prizewinning thriller: a literary crime story for readers who thought Peter Heg's Smilla's Sense of Snow was too upbeat. Arriving at the Swedish commune Starhill to join her lover Dan Ulander, Annie Raft stumbles on two corpses lying in a tent and sees a boy running from the scene. Eighteen years later, she and her daughter, Mia, see the boy, now grown to manhood. Before Annie can tell the authorities that she's recognized their only lead in the unsolved case, Mia is killed. But alert readers will long since have surmised that the boy she saw was Johan Brandberg, who fled his miserable family after escaping from the well his resentful stepbrothers had lowered him into. Taking with him an eel he rescued from the well, Johan had hitchhiked with an older woman calling herself Ylja across the border to Norway, where the woman briskly relieved him of his virginity, established him as the latest incarnation of the mystical Traveler who was prophesied to arrive with a live animal, and finally drove him away. The frenzy of isolation to which Ylja pushes Johan is mirrored by Annie's own alienation back in Starhill, where the hatred of Swedes for Lapps and commune members for the bourgeois who surround them—not to mention the rivalries within the commune—finally reaches toxic proportions. In an Arctic landscape whose grim determinism recalls Hardy, commune families grow, harden into deformity, or split up with chill fatalism, and readers impatient with Ekman's brooding vignettes of calcifying loneliness are likely to feel like polar explorers trudging along under heavy loads in the worst weather, hoping to find, in the aftermath of Johan's return, the key that will redeem their ordeal in a burst of wild insight. Not for the impatient or fainthearted: a dour study of murder as the logical outgrowth of simmering, all-consuming rage.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-385-48178-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1995
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
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
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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