A solid coming-of-age tale that gets teen turmoil right.
A teenage girl adapts to a new home, town, and school while navigating her first romantic relationship in this YA novel with hints of the paranormal.
Sixteen-year-old Gentry never lived in one place long enough to make friends or find romance. Her father; his girlfriend, Nikki; and her brother, Rawson, are forced by financial circumstances to live with her great-aunt Tom (short for Tomasina) in Wiregrass, Georgia. Her dilapidated antebellum house is too much for the old woman to manage, so she welcomes them in, but she keeps confusing Gentry for her own daughter, Sylvie, who committed suicide at 16. Gentry dreads going to school until she meets heartthrob Legend Wallace, whom she deems a “Sirloin,” her “favorite cut of beef.” She thinks that pursuing him is futile, as he’s constantly courted by cheerleaders: “I’m always doing that—yearning for the unattainable.” He’s actually interested in Rawson; they were hiding their relationship due to small-town homophobia. Gentry participates in a fake relationship with Legend to hide his secret, but her continued infatuation makes her believe that she can somehow will him to love her. Meanwhile, Gentry starts hearing the ghost of Sylvia, who cautions her against the lie of daydreams. Soon, the living and the dead must work together to right past wrongs. Eadie (Mistaken Identity, 2013) brings several topical issues into this novel, sensitively addressing themes of sexual identity, homophobia, and suicide; regarding the latter, Sylvia is shown to be tied to her mother’s house until she resolves her own past conflict—and she sees Gentry as being on the path to a similarly heartbreaking fate. Gentry’s first-person narration is well written and rings true for a teenage girl who frequently has her head in the clouds. Aunt Tom’s Southern witticisms make her a truly standout character; her memorable one-liners include the observation that “it’s so dry the trees are bribing the dogs to whiz on them.”
A solid coming-of-age tale that gets teen turmoil right.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4809-9500-0
Page Count: 390
Publisher: Dorrance Publishing Co.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2020
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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