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