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LEAVES

Name: LEAVES
Author: Leona Mason Heitsch
ISBN: 978-1-4363-4113-4

by Leona Mason Heitsch ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 22, 2008

Heartening verse from Middle America.

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Part meditation on nature and transience, part love letter to a Missouri home, Leaves is a strong contribution from a promising regional poet.

Heitsch infuses her verse with a clear and comforting sense of place, and her place of choice is her home in the Ozarks. So secure is the author in her hillside abode that she tears off in easy colloquials: â€œThere’s a probe approaching Mars, but big deal. / We’re in the Ozarks, under the beaver moon / near full”–we’re sure there is nowhere else she’d rather be. Heitsch clearly pulls from the school of Frost and Whitman, but there is also a bit of the plains-inspired vastness of the Nebraskan and former poet laureate Ted Kooser. There is also plenty of the poet’s own definite sensibility, and we are as happy when she cleaves to her predecessors’ traditions as when she heads out on her own. Heitsch writes mostly in an easy free verse. Her lines are short, but never rushed or fragmented, and her language is casual and accessible without ever slipping into lazy slang. The images are by turns natural and domestic, and she has a real knack for infusing the mundane with inspiring new light. Of course, Heitsch is not a perfect poet, and she could be more careful with her words; her diction is sometimes strained, sometimes redundant. For example, how is it different to be â€œlatently aware” than to be merely â€œaware,” as her speaker is in the less-than-elegant â€œCheer”? And some of her experiments with rhyme seem juvenile, as in â€œFar on the Gravel”: â€œâ€¦the punkin’ on the step is ready excep’ / we’ll light it tonight when the time is right / to show the waif that here is safe.” But these are minor sins in a collection full of many small joys.

Heartening verse from Middle America.

Pub Date: July 22, 2008

ISBN: 978-1-4363-4113-4

Page Count: -

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2010

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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SUMMER ISLAND

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2001

The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...

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Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.

Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.

The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.

Pub Date: March 1, 2001

ISBN: 0-609-60737-5

Page Count: 336

Publisher: Crown

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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LAST ORDERS

by Graham Swift ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 5, 1996

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Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.