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LETTERS FROM CLEO AND TYRONE

Name: LETTERS FROM CLEO AND TYRONE
Author: L. Virginia Browne
ISBN: 0-312-26706-1

A FELINE PERSPECTIVE ON LOVE, LIFE, AND LITTER

by L. Virginia Browne & Linda Hamner ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 2000

All too cute. But Mommies who speak the language of cats will find it catnip at daybreak.

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Amusing first novel and takeoff on the old archy & mahitabel series, with two cats writing to each other by e-mail without their mommies knowing it.

One day Linda finds some diskettes hidden in a box. When she puts them on her p.c., the symbols seem nonsensical, but she notes repeated formations, so sends the disks off to Professor Manfred Katz, the UCLA linguist. The good professor determines that they’re in Felinese (not the more common Catçais) and translates them for Linda, who owns Cleo the Divine, and for Virginia, who owns Tyrone the Great. Cleo has delusions of grandeur and at ten years owns up to age six. When she and her sister Honey turned up one day, pathetic and bedraggled, at Linda Hamner’s doorstep, Linda and her husband could keep only Honey, so foisted Cleo off on Virginia. Tyrone was rescued from near death at the pound and became top cat at Linda’s, and now he and Cleo are lovers, linguistically. Tyrone, top poet among toms, calls Cleo “the Syrup on My Pancakes, the Peanut Butter on My Jelly, the Tuna in My Macaroni of Life.” Meanwhile, Cleo has to put up with loopy Chester, known as The Big Old Stupid Dog, who just stares, sleeps and drools, and with thuggish Stealth, a lowlife cat Cleo calls “a pickup-with-a-gunrack kind of cat.” On New Year’s Eve, she nibbles shrimp pâté, sips champagne and watches Dick Clark on TV. The correspondents exchange wisdom about attention-getting devices and the shortcomings of their mommies. Their big tryst takes place at Kamp Kritter when all the animals from both households get together for a week’s babble. It’s an affair to remember, Cleo and Tyrone’s paws touching between carriers as the music swells.

All too cute. But Mommies who speak the language of cats will find it catnip at daybreak.

Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2000

ISBN: 0-312-26706-1

Page Count: 160

Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2000

Categories:

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.