Reminds warmly of Lonesome Dove and others in the McMurtry canon (Comanche Moon, 1997, etc.): colorful, poignant, funny.
McMurtry returns to the Old West he knows so well and loves so deeply for this first in a series.
On an otherwise ordinary day in 1866, Mary Margaret Cecil’s steel-trap mind clangs shut. Time to leave Boone’s Lick, Missouri, and trek west to Wyoming, she suddenly announces to that passel of folk who are completely dependent on her—for their physical well being, for their values, and, yes, for ongoing entertainment. Her brood is composed of three teenagers and a toddler, but that by no means completes the universe. There’s also rickety-rackety Granpa Crackenthorpe; Rosie, the sweet-natured whore, her half sister, and the ever resourceful Uncle Seth, Mary Margaret’s faithful swain, who also happens to be her brother-in-law. And once the buckboards are westward bound, there are two more notable additions: Charley Seven Days, the enigmatic Shoshone on a knightly mission, and Père Villy, a Friar Tuck of a priest, heading for Siberia, where he’s decided he’s needed. The why of the Cecil clan’s migration? The object is to track down Dick Cecil, that wandering wagoner, Mary Margaret’s husband, who hasn’t been seen in Boone’s Lick parts for upwards of 14 months. But then what? That’s what Shay Cecil, the story’s first-person narrator, would like to know. As for that, Ma keeps her own counsel. There will be Indian fights, brushes with bears, an almost disaster at a river crossing, surprise meetings, painful departures, dozens of near-death experiences until, finally, the trail ends at Wyoming’s far-flung Fort Phil Kearney. There, Dick Cecil’s family encounters . . . Dick Cecil’s family, and the irascible, indomitable Mary Margaret does what she’s traveled those hundreds of miles to do.
Reminds warmly of Lonesome Dove and others in the McMurtry canon (Comanche Moon, 1997, etc.): colorful, poignant, funny.Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2000
ISBN: 0-684-86886-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2000
A presold prefab blockbuster, what with King's Carrie hitting the moviehouses, Salem's Lot being lensed, The Shining itself sold to Warner Bros. and tapped as a Literary Guild full selection, NAL paperback, etc. (enough activity to demand an afterlife to consummate it all).
The setting is The Overlook, a palatial resort on a Colorado mountain top, snowbound and closed down for the long, long winter. Jack Torrance, a booze-fighting English teacher with a history of violence, is hired as caretaker and, hoping to finish a five-act tragedy he's writing, brings his wife Wendy and small son Danny to the howling loneliness of the half-alive and mad palazzo. The Overlook has a gruesome past, scenes from which start popping into the present in various suites and the ballroom. At first only Danny, gifted with second sight (he's a "shiner"), can see them; then the whole family is being zapped by satanic forces. The reader needs no supersight to glimpse where the story's going as King's formula builds to a hotel reeling with horrors during Poesque New Year's Eve revelry and confetti outta nowhere....
Back-prickling indeed despite the reader's unwillingness at being mercilessly manipulated.
Pub Date: Jan. 28, 1976
ISBN: 0385121679
Page Count: 453
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1976
PERSPECTIVES
Not as thematically ambitious as Whitehead’s earlier work, but a whole lot of fun to read.
Another surprise from an author who never writes the same novel twice.
Though Whitehead has earned considerable critical acclaim for his earlier work—in particular his debut (The Intuitionist, 1999) and its successor (John Henry Days, 2001)—he’ll likely reach a wider readership with his warmest novel to date. Funniest as well, though there have been flashes of humor throughout his writing. The author blurs the line between fiction and memoir as he recounts the coming-of-age summer of 15-year-old Benji Cooper in the family’s summer retreat of New York’s Sag Harbor. “According to the world, we were the definition of paradox: black boys with beach houses,” writes Whitehead. Caucasians are only an occasional curiosity within this idyll, and parents are mostly absent as well. Each chapter is pretty much a self-contained entity, corresponding to a rite of passage: getting the first job, negotiating the mysteries of the opposite sex. There’s an accident with a BB gun and plenty of episodes of convincing someone older to buy beer, but not much really happens during this particular summer. Yet by the end of it, Benji is well on his way to becoming Ben, and he realizes that he is a different person than when the summer started. He also realizes that this time in his life will eventually live only in memory. There might be some distinctions between Benji and Whitehead, though the novelist also spent his youthful summers in Sag Harbor and was the same age as Benji in 1985, when the novel is set. Yet the first-person narrator has the novelist’s eye for detail, craft of character development and analytical instincts for sharp social commentary.
Not as thematically ambitious as Whitehead’s earlier work, but a whole lot of fun to read.Pub Date: April 28, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-385-52765-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2009
BOOK TO SCREEN
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