Stark delineation of childhood’s treacherous terrain.
A family reels when an angelic son vanishes, in Carey’s heartfelt fourth novel.
In less capable hands, the story of a family torn apart by a runaway teenager, especially one who returns as a guardian angel, could turn mawkish. Hugh Furey is 15 when he goes missing after attempting to visit his ex-girlfriend in rehab. Hugh had been making the ’80s punk scene in Harvard Square instead of attending high school. His father, a professor of theology at Boston College, suspends work on a groundbreaking angels treatise to oversee the search for Hugh. His wife takes to her bed and turns over housekeeping and childcare for five-year-old Owen to their young daughter Lena. Five years later, Hugh is still missing. Dad has lost his post and is now an editor for a religious publisher. Mom is in med school. A mutual attraction binds Owen, now ten, to classmate Danny, who initiates sexual exploration, happened upon by Danny’s mother. Now a pariah at school due to Danny’s defensive queer-baiting, Owen malingers, missing weeks of fifth grade. Secluded in his room, he indulges his obsession with gravestone rubbings and angels—he recalls being rescued from electrocution by an angelicized Hugh. Tenth-grader Lena, talented, like Hugh, in photography, develops rolls of 35mm film shot by Hugh depicting his Harvard Square friends. She’s determined to follow the trail her parents have seemingly abandoned. Disguising herself as a spiky-haired, combat-booted boy, she goes in search of drug-dealer Lionel, a regular in Hugh’s photos. Enticed into the Ecstasy-popping and pot-smoking world of Sebastian, a conduit to Lionel, she reckons the cost, to Owen and herself, of her parents’ shell-shocked obliviousness. After transgressing the gender divide, virtually channeling Hugh and losing her virginity, Lena thinks she has found the key to Hugh’s disappearance. Alternating between Owen’s and Lena’s points of view, Carey (Love in the Asylum, 2004, etc.) details the Fureys’ disintegration and tentative steps toward rapprochement.
Stark delineation of childhood’s treacherous terrain.Pub Date: Aug. 8, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-621289-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2006
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
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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BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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