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FARGO BURNS

Name: FARGO BURNS
Author: Kos Kostmayer
ISBN: 978-0-692-03649-5

by Kos Kostmayer ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2020

An effective, tragic story of a decent man in a battle with the vicissitudes of life.

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A man in crisis tries to find answers.

Playwright and screenwriter Kostmayer’s first novel begins with a bang and a crash. It’s 1971. The Vietnam War is raging, and 32-year-old Fargo Burns is throwing furniture, pans, brooms, and anything else he can grab out the window of his 12th-floor New York City apartment. He’s been hearing voices again. He's “losing his grip.” He feels sad, bewildered, and lost, yet somehow satisfied. Kostmayer draws upon his extensive dramatic experience to fashion an existential novel which is more play than prose, driven primarily by dialogue. Kostmayer employs first- and third-person narrative, interior monologue, and voices, like the chorus in a Greek drama, which emanate from Fargo’s mind, to roughly stitch together his story. This “night of fearful, inexplicable misery and violence” sends Fargo to the hospital, where he meets Lane Dubinsky, a sympathetic psychiatrist. The story moves back and forth between Fargo’s messy existence and his sessions with Lane. He’s broke, unemployed, living on welfare, and abusing drugs and alcohol. He’s separated from Holly, his wife, and their three children, whom he loves. After his release, Fargo finds a dingy apartment and regularly returns to his old haunt, Havoc, where he once worked as a bartender, coming under the spell of sexy, poetry-reading Billie Speed, girlfriend of psychopathic killer Kohler Skane. Frequent flashbacks to Fargo’s youth in Bitter Forest, Mississippi, introduce us to his family, the bigoted South in the 1940s, and the joyful as well as harrowing sources of those voices. Fargo is broken; he wants to be “fixed.” A big decision about his future awaits. It could end in a bad way. Kostmayer takes us on a bumpy, erratic ride, but there’s much here to admire.

An effective, tragic story of a decent man in a battle with the vicissitudes of life.

Pub Date: March 1, 2020

ISBN: 978-0-692-03649-5

Page Count: 222

Publisher: Dr. Cicero Books

Review Posted Online: July 9, 2020

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION | GENERAL FICTION

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DISTANT SHORES

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 2002

Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...

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Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.

After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?

Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).

Pub Date: July 1, 2002

ISBN: 0-345-45071-X

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Ballantine

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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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.