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LONE STAR ICE AND FIRE

Name: LONE STAR ICE AND FIRE
Author: L.E. Brady
ISBN: 0-9708293-3-7

by L.E. Brady ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 15, 2004

Shaping and cutting would have been helpful, but first-novelist Brady writes with energy and authenticity.

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Two guitar-playing Texas brothers come of age in the 1970s and travel parallel paths through the southern music scene.

Sick of his father Big Billy Jay’s abuse and itching to make his fortune, 17-year-old blues boy Sonny Blaine leaves behind the small town of Mingus and heads for Austin with his new Fender guitar. It’s 1967, and Sonny and his group, the White Tornadoes, already have some experience and a broad repertoire, including selections from the recent British Invasion. Supercool band member Johnny Lee Hogan, high yellow bassist who always wears sunglasses, widens the Tornadoes’ appeal to colored clubs as well. Sonny’s only regret is leaving behind beloved brother Walker, likely to bear the brunt of dad’s bad temper in his absence; Sonny gives Walker his prized Broadcaster guitar by way of goodbye. Before long, Walker follows Sonny, and trouble follows Walker in the person of girlfriend Nancy, who claims to be pregnant, and her brother Floyd, who’s angry enough to whale on the young man. Sonny defuses this situation and, after Nancy’s condition turns out to be a false alarm, snags the young woman on the rebound, a situation that does little to further brotherly harmony. (A few years later, Walker returns the favor by sleeping with—though he’s married—the unrequited love of Sonny’s life, Cilla, a musician and the daughter of legendary British guitarist Reg Mountbatten.) Walker marries a blazingly talented singer named Vada, who is equally devoted to him and to cocaine, while Sonny becomes known as Firewalker Blaine, and the story comes all the way to the late 1980s and MTV, with career highs and lows, sibling rivalry, and changing music trends.

Shaping and cutting would have been helpful, but first-novelist Brady writes with energy and authenticity.

Pub Date: July 15, 2004

ISBN: 0-9708293-3-7

Page Count: 411

Publisher: Coral Press

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2004

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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BETWEEN SISTERS

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 2003

Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...

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Sisters in and out of love.

Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?

Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.

Pub Date: May 1, 2003

ISBN: 0-345-45073-6

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Ballantine

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003

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.