This parable of friendship and the spiritual strength it provides will please devotees of the Reverend Black series, but...
When her husband of 12 years slides into bed at 5 a.m., Celine is stunned. So begins this woman’s journey through a valley of shadows.
Roby (The Ultimate Betrayal, 2015, etc.) returns with another tale about a member of the Rev. Curtis Black’s Deliverance Outreach congregation. Celine Richardson has spent the last five years building her own online social media marketing business. Instead of reaping the benefits of her hard work, she discovers that her marriage has fallen apart. Keith claims he's tried to talk to her about her emotional neglect; he says she's poured all her energy into her work and into their 10-year-old daughter, Kassie. What did she expect? Of course he’s drifted away. Celine doesn’t have much time to puzzle out Keith’s behavior because she's also discovered a lump in her left breast, which sends her through a medical ordeal. With Keith absent, Celine’s brother, Jackson, and her best friend, Lauren, step up, driving Celine to her surgery and radiation treatments and sheltering Kassie from the worst of her mother’s illness. Breast cancer, ironically, gives Celine a small respite from fretting about her marital woes. Given time to reflect, Celine regrets judging other jilted women, she regrets neglecting Keith, she worries about Kassie’s future, and she worries about the fate of her marriage vows. Yet her thoughts skate quickly, never lingering long enough to answer her own questions: what had she done to deserve such emotional pain? How had she missed Keith’s treachery? Roby lightly traces Celine’s travails, skimming the surface of what could be rather deep emotional terrain. Instead, Lauren, gospel music, prayer, and Scripture offer Celine easy solace.
This parable of friendship and the spiritual strength it provides will please devotees of the Reverend Black series, but it's too slight to garner new fans.Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4555-2608-6
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2015
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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