Unerring eye for 1950s detail lifts this soap-operatic story above the ordinary, even if the plot springs are a bit too...
Teenager grows up fast in small Florida town—and then the plot really takes off in Hart’s second outing (after Waterwoman, 2002).
In expressive prose that avoids “southern fiction” preciousness, Hart brings us Dory Camber, daughter of Owen, hardware-store owner in sleepy Ordinary Springs. Dory’s earliest memories are fraught with questions. Where did her mother, Vera, disappear with that suitcase after telling toddler Dory a bedtime story? Why did her father bury her mother’s clothes? Why are her parents’ former best friends, the McMillans, now standoffish? Why is her father so distant? Dory works as her father’s housekeeper and helper at the store, and she assumes she’s first in his secretive heart—until the Yankee city-slicker Fitzgeralds move in across the street. Dory realizes with horror that her father, oblivious to the blandishments of every other female in town, is falling hard for the Capri-clad, spike-heeled, Dali-loving Myra Fitzgerald, whose WWII vet husband, Frank, is bedridden. While Owen and Myra are otherwise occupied in another room, Dory unwittingly becomes an accessory to Frank’s suicide. And then, when her father announces that he’s to marry Myra, Dory loses her already tenuous grip on self-restraint and, the night of her 16th birthday, has an assignation with childhood friend Pearce McMillan under a carnival truck, empties the cash register at Owen’s store, and tries to run away, only to be apprehended by the sheriff, who has zeroed in on her role in Frank’s death. From there, it’s on to reform school, escape (her expertise with hardware serves Dory well), a stint at a roadside diner and tourist trap, the birth of daughter Rose, an affair with a half-Seminole ’gator trapper, and a newfound determination to return to Ordinary Springs for a vigorous spring-cleaning of her father’s house and its resident demons.
Unerring eye for 1950s detail lifts this soap-operatic story above the ordinary, even if the plot springs are a bit too visible.Pub Date: Jan. 4, 2005
ISBN: 0-425-20005-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2004
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
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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