A big-hearted but unfocused adventure tale.
A Christian parable with an action-adventure twist.
The latest from Hoyer (In the Absence of Orders, 2007, etc.) takes place in a secluded valley called Thanoton, where the weather is permanently cloudy and the residents are taught that “the only thing outside the valley is a wasteland with creatures ready to devour anyone that enters.” Some residents follow the teachings of an ancient group known as the Children of Light, worshipping in secret to avoid punishment by Thanoton’s despotic king. Aided by a complex web of covert organizations and savvy double (and triple) agents, three teenagers set out to restore the valley by studying and following a text called The Book of Prophesies, after they hear messages from a mysterious Whisperer. The plot’s Christian underpinnings are plain; for example, one leader reminds his fellows: “We are here for the people, to set them free—free to worship the Light of the Word. Our highest purpose is to glorify Him.” Readers of all religious persuasions, however, may enjoy the book’s classic action-adventure elements; espionage, secret messages and daring escapes abound. All that duplicity, however, eventually becomes hard to follow. New characters keep popping into the story, and their abundant abilities to deceive one another and operate in secret under an oppressive regime increasingly push the limits of plausibility. Even more confusingly, the original main characters are largely absent from the book’s second and third acts, making the narrative feel disjointed and sometimes directionless. Still, Hoyer draws some compelling shades of gray out of what could have been a black-and-white tale of good versus evil, giving even the heroic characters space for flaws and keeping readers guessing about their true motivations. Reflecting on his own shortcomings, for example, one character thinks of the Whisperer: “He chose to use people to accomplish His will….He uses even their failures to accomplish His purpose.” Although they are couched in Christian terms, this novel’s nuanced values will likely resonate with readers of any stripe.
A big-hearted but unfocused adventure tale.Pub Date: April 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-0692023747
Page Count: 472
Publisher: Christian Publishing House
Review Posted Online: Feb. 23, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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