A child country-music star, forced to choose between family and success, is guided by an angel in this music-video-on-paper that's been cobbled together by (surprise!) a child country-music star and her adult helper. It's yuletide in Nashville, and 14-year-old Anna Lee is in town to appear at the Grand Ole Opry—having become a sensation her first time around. Daughter of a blue-collar, part-time musician and veteran of nine years on the small-town bandstands of Mississippi and Texas, Anna appreciates the fact that the record- company meetings scheduled for this visit can make or break her career. Yet, when her father's favorite country singer from the '40s, now in serious decline, invites her to kill a day touring the town with her, Anna can't resist. The next morning, though, while Anna's waiting for her new friend (``I can't tell her name''), she receives a call saying that beloved Grandma Teeden in Mississippi is in the hospital with serious heart trouble. Can Anna rush to her granny's bedside? Guiltily, she claims that business concerns force her to stay where she is—and then she rushes off for her day on the town. Strangely, though, Anna's new friend shows her not only the famous old musicians' hangouts but such grittier ``musicians'- life'' locales as the bus station through which the failures shuffle back home. Anna even finds herself on a bus headed out to the countryside, where her companion tells her of a blizzard that once buried an entire busload of people, including herself, for days. The moral? Well, a chastened Anna, filled suddenly with family loyalty above all else, is eager to go back to Grandma and home. But when Anna tells her dad who she spent the day with, he claims that that singer has been dead for years. . . . Consumer product more than creative work, with copyright held not even by an author, but by LeAnn Rimes Entertainment, Inc. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-385-49087-9
Page Count: 119
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1997
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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