A potent story that offers an engaging meditation on the most basic desire—to know oneself.
As a family secret festers, a father strives to connect with his adrift teenage daughter in Legters’ emotional debut novel.
Theo has raised the now-teenage Persephone, nicknamed “Seph,” since the day she was born. Back then, young Natalie, Seph’s birth mother, handed her daughter, the product of a fling with the high school basketball star, over to Theo, her loyal and protective friend, and she didn’t look back. He was a motorcycle-riding, boot-wearing, tattooed outcast, but he always wanted a family of his own. As a result, he was all too happy to adopt a child, due to his own genetic history of abuse and alcoholism. So without the help of his own parents or a partner, Theo raised Seph alone. He and Natalie remained in the same town and built lives of their own, but they made good on their promise never to tell Seph the identities of her real mother or father. But as she grows up, she starts staying out until all hours without returning phone calls, and develops a penchant for tattoos, dark clothing, and solitude. As a result, Theo worries that he and Natalie made the wrong choice by keeping her true origins from her. Seph’s habits and attitudes might seem normal for a teenager coming into her own, but Theo has a bad feeling about them, and it turns out that his fears aren’t entirely unfounded. A deep, spectacular tension propels this story forward as both Theo and Seph try to discover who they are to each other, so that they may find their own places in the world and within their family. Legters relays their psychological journeys with an acute urgency and a sense of inevitable doom (“Seph was born feeling lost”). It’s more than a story about adoption, family secrets, or guilt; it also addresses other universal matters, such as parents’ desires to be relevant to their children as they grow up and, as Theo puts it, how they can “break…the news that adults can make the worst possible decisions.” Eventually, the truth about Seph’s parentage comes out, and it’s not what readers will expect.
A potent story that offers an engaging meditation on the most basic desire—to know oneself.Pub Date: April 4, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-59021-336-0
Page Count: 196
Publisher: Lethe Press
Review Posted Online: April 6, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
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
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
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SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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