A winning portrait of a high school teacher who struggles with her new career and memories of her own days as a student.
Back in the late 1970s, Nancy Adams had a fling with her high school teacher Russell Parsons. Twenty years later, widowed and adrift and living in her childhood home outside Jacksonville, Florida, she accepts Russell's offer to teach at her old high school. He's now the principal.
Nancy, a once-aspiring teacher who wrote book reviews during her time in Atlanta, is anything but a bookworm—we first encounter her sitting on a dock plugging Coke bottles with a gun. But she's unprepared for the foul mouths and minimal attention spans of her students. She doesn't know what to expect from Russell, whose beautiful wife never recovered mentally from a stroke she suffered after giving birth to twins. Nancy does know what to expect from the flirtatious Dell Rose, a handsome one-time basketball star who now coaches the school team, but she isn't sure what she wants from him, either. And then there's Dana, a mysterious, prematurely aged senior whose baby may be Russell's. Why else would he extend such preferential treatment to her? Nancy slowly makes her mark while becoming increasingly committed to her new calling. Much of her "education" as a teacher will be familiar to readers of high school fiction: She learns to deal with faculty members' egos, students' special needs and school board politics. But Nancy has such a lively, offbeat presence that you take an instant rooting interest in her. And Baker (The Flamingo Rising, 1997, etc.) depicts the other characters so well, and with such understanding, that the novel overcomes its somewhat dated quality.
A winning portrait of a high school teacher who struggles with her new career and memories of her own days as a student.Pub Date: June 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-888160-78-9
Page Count: 414
Publisher: Ice Tea Books/Ice Cube Press
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
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
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
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
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