A moving adventure story about the volatility of the father-son bond.
In Birdseye’s oddly compelling fiction debut, a father-son hiking trip goes violently wrong.
Josh Donaldson is convinced—browbeaten, really—by his charismatic, literate, slightly unbalanced father to go for a long, running hike in Oregon’s wild and remote Cedar Ridge. Dad has always been an outsize figure in Donaldson’s life, writing long unpublished novels and constantly challenging his family to unconventional thinking. His force of personality overcomes Donaldson’s reservations about hiking and running in a wilderness area unknown to both of them. Once they reach their starting point, these reservations are only deepened by warnings from locals, who point out both the dangers of the terrain—“The woods are always dangerous. Damn foolish city folk are always comin’ up here and gettin’ lost”—and the presence in the woods of a major drug runner known as the Columbian. But Dad gets his way, and soon the two of them are encountering the beauties of the Oregon backcountry, beautifully described by Birdseye. Displaying virtually no hiking or camping skills, Dad instead waxes poetic at every turn, reciting Keats upon seeing a swollen mountain stream, which prompts a doubtful Donaldson to reflect that the water seemed “too real, and far too perilous to be poetic, except perhaps in a poem depicting death by means of forces beyond reason.” Inevitably, the two encounter the Columbian’s men, and violence erupts; Birdseye’s formerly ruminative narrative pace sharpens considerably once father and son confront the Columbian himself, who turns out to be oddly similar to Dad in both his wide reading and his penchant for crackpot philosophizing. “The fate of mankind ultimately doomed to perish from the cold is of no consequence,” the Columbian says. “Taken to heart it is a tragedy of unendurable proportions.” Dad is wounded, and Donaldson is certain he’s going to die, but even in these fairly standard hikers-in-peril sections, Birdseye raises his plot above the commonplace with detailed and quite touching depiction of Dad’s loss of confidence in his ebullient view of life—and of Donaldson’s loss of confidence in Dad.
A moving adventure story about the volatility of the father-son bond.Pub Date: May 23, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4771-0789-8
Page Count: 314
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: March 18, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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