Gentle, music-infused romantic drama taking place in an out-of-the-way spot on the Eastern Seaboard.
A new life of friends and young love begins for Robin George when he forsakes his Maryland family’s retail empire to work as a bridge tender.
First-time author Davies’ lyrical novel reads like a true labor of love, with an endearing cast and a fondly rendered locale. The time period is the early 1980s in the Georgetown/Chestertown vicinity in Kent County, Maryland. Traversed by many rivers entering the Chesapeake Bay, the area sustains a strong boating and college-town culture. This is where young Robinson George, heir to his family’s chain of big-box drugstores, accepts an obscure state job as apprentice bridge tender—a contemplative gig operating (and practically dwelling inside) an old drawbridge spanning a waterway used by pleasure boaters. Robin joins the “brotherhood of the bridge,” which includes the widowed, ailing old tender Sean Flaherty; the big, laconic Odis; Father Hunter, a liberal-minded Catholic priest; and Sarah, a lesbian newspaper reporter covering the region. Robin’s new life coincides with a dizzying affair with the voluptuous Melinda McClellan, a more experienced older woman starting a promising but slightly anxious career as a vocalist on the regional coffeehouse circuit. The sensuous Melinda moves in with Robin, smitten by his good-hearted infatuation, but she does not seem to consider the arrangement monogamous or lasting. Indeed, a redevelopment scheme aims to demolish the old, possibly failing mechanical bridge in favor of an impersonal, high-rise motorway. The idyll can’t last, a fact confronted by the ensemble with wise acceptance—one might even say too much wise acceptance, as even Robin’s bourgeois parents don’t dispute his sudden veering off the life/business plan. Elements of R&B music and Roman Catholicism (a pretty progressive brand, considering all this technically happens during the Reagan years) flavor the thoughtful, elegiac narrative.
Gentle, music-infused romantic drama taking place in an out-of-the-way spot on the Eastern Seaboard.Pub Date: June 3, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-692-70618-3
Page Count: 338
Publisher: Herman Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2017
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
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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