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ELEPHANT WINTER

Name: ELEPHANT WINTER
Author: Kim Echlin
ISBN: 0-7867-0610-4

by Kim Echlin ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 1999

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Touching on the travails of birth and death among elephants (and humans), Echlin offers a tender, mesmerizing account of the last stages in a mother and daughter’s relationship. Called back from Zimbabwe, where she—d been studying cave paintings, Sophie returns to her native Ontario to aid her mother, terminally ill with cancer. The family home, bordering on a small safari-zoo, provides Sophie with fine views of elephants making their daily march from the barn into the snowy fields beyond—and not a bad view, either, of their male keeper, Jo Mann. She and Jo fall rather quickly into bed and then into an easy relationship. As part of the tale, Echlin surrenders an inventive “Elephant-English dictionary,” a tome Sophie is creating based on her infrasound audio recordings and bits of which, highly idiosyncratic and anecdotal, are interspersed throughout the story (a particular elephantine expression of longing, for example, reminds Sophie of the last lines of an Ezra Pound poem). Sadly enough, her growing fascination with the elephants, and her pregnancy by Jo, coincide with her mother’s decline; once a vital person, as well as an artist, the dying woman now simply withdraws into the seclusion of her room. Amid their sometimes disquieting, sometimes soothing routine, Sophie listens to her mother reminisce about her long-ago life in Paris. Then the dark presence of Alecto intervenes: an elephant researcher, he won his reputation by shooting elephants in the wild for the autopsy opportunities to be gained. The climax—a heady convergence of Sophie’s mother’s death, an attempted rape, and an elephant charging—ends up leaving Sophie alone at last with the elephants and her new daughter, settled and purposeful. A sometimes emotionally scattered debut, but the intriguing lore of the big-tusked, long-trunked quadrupeds transforms it into a lovely treatise on the noble compassion of animals.

Pub Date: April 1, 1999

ISBN: 0-7867-0610-4

Page Count: 224

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1999

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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by Kristin Hannah

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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.