A haunting reminder about the loss of innocence.
In Skomal’s (Bluff, 2012, etc.) YA novel, a group of children in a small Midwestern town learns about the harsh realities of life after the Korean War.
The children of Sand Flats, Neb., may be off from school for the summer, but they’re definitely not on vacation. It’s 1954, and Hap, Patsy, Beah and Raz meet amid the fallout of the Korean War, which has ravaged their lives. Hap, who looks “like a wax museum statue of Peter Pan,” is as lost and motherless as the boy who wouldn’t grow up. He’s abused by his father and tries to build his own, better world. Hotheaded Patsy just moved to town (after being suspended from her last school for fighting) and must learn to deal with her brother’s serious injury, which he sustained during the war and has sent him to the VA hospital. She also must come to terms with her brother’s secrets, which threaten the family’s stability. Then there are Beah, who lives in the shadow of her deceased older brother, and Raz, who is Jewish and has an “innate beauty” that sets her apart from the others. This coming-of-age story follows the group’s members, who meet for the first time that fateful summer and contend with murder, lies from their parents, lies to their parents, missing limbs, homosexuality, theft and abuse. Together, they learn the importance of friendship, truth and honesty, and they also learn that life is rarely easy. It’s a dark story about a dark world, but Skomal makes the story readable and lovely via her prose. Sand Flats—a deep-rooted cattle-farming community 20 miles from Omaha that “came to life thanks to the Union Pacific Railroad’s western push to develop the rail clear to California in the late 1800s”—itself becomes a main character. By placing this group of children, their parents and other townspeople in this distinct geographic location, Skomal has created a world that couldn’t take place anywhere else.
A haunting reminder about the loss of innocence.Pub Date: March 23, 2013
ISBN: 978-1478192497
Page Count: 290
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 13, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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 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
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