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
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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