Southern charm, mystery-lite and the details of theater life converge in Shaffer’s likable third novel (Ladies of Garrison...
A pleasant excursion into the heart and soul of theater life involving two women who become the mysterious inheritors of an old opera house.
When Katie and Randa receive letters from a Georgia lawyer informing them they are the beneficiaries in a will, it seems the two have no connection—Katie is a native New Yorker and a scriptwriter for the soap her mother made famous, and Miranda is a business manager for spoiled Hollywood actors. But after a few days together in Georgia, the two find what has always eluded them—family history. Helped by the strange coincidences uniting them (both are named for Shakespearean characters, both were raised by a single parent, an actor), the two women form a tentative bond as they discover they are the new owners of the Venable Opera House, a 100-year-old theater that was once the pride of now-run-down Massonville. They are enchanted by the beautiful building, but plan on selling the money pit to Mike Killian, who’ll soon tear it down to make way for condos. Can Katie and Randa really let that happen? Randa’s 11-year-old daughter Susie is betting not, and has found the theater’s history in hopes that sentimentality will win out over business sense. Half of the novel traces the not altogether happy rise of the Venable clan, a family of actors, drinkers, tough ladies and louts who managed to keep the theater running for nearly a century. Matriarch Juliet acquired the theater under criminal circumstances, her son-in-law Edward kept it going in the Depression by playing the same hammy part his whole life (and keeping his homosexual affairs discreet), while Olivia stole from her children to keep it going in the ’70s. Though essential for solving the mystery of Katie and Randa’s benefactor, the Venable flashbacks are the novel’s weak spot, lacking the color and detail of the periods in which they’re set. Nevertheless, Shaffer (Ladies of Garrison Garden, 2005, etc.) has a nice touch with characters and the feel-good ending doesn’t disappoint.
Southern charm, mystery-lite and the details of theater life converge in Shaffer’s likable third novel (Ladies of Garrison Garden, 2005, etc.).Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6063-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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