Overwrought and flimsy—but at least the coastal scenery is lovely.
Rice’s latest (Dance With Me, 2004, etc.) focuses on a family with major communication problems.
John Sullivan is a talented Irish-American sculptor who finds inspiration in extreme climates. His grandest installation yet, a huge sculpture made of tree trunks, stands on the edge of a cliff overlooking the sea in a remote part of Ireland. Soon after wife Honor and their three daughters come to see the completed project, John’s hot temper and extreme nature land him in deep trouble. He’s implicated in the mysterious death of a jealous local, found on a ledge beneath the cliffs with John’s oldest daughter Regis standing by the body. Refusing to defend himself in court and drag Regis further into the case, John gets a sentence of six years in an Irish prison. The way his wife Honor sees it, he abandoned their family out of sheer stubbornness. Just a few months before Regis’s wedding, John returns home to Connecticut from prison. Can he repair the damage that his absence has done? Honor is pondering divorce, and their daughters are basket cases. With a little help from his sister (a nun), John rekindles his romance with Honor. Their flaky offspring are the ones who really need guidance and attention. Regis is marrying for all the wrong reasons. Middle daughter Agnes has delusional tendencies, and when she incurs a suspicious head injury, her family wonders if she is suicidal. The Sullivans must come to terms with what actually happened six years ago in Ireland, or the family will be destroyed. Readers looking for Rice’s standard mix of enduring love and family drama won’t be disappointed. However, they certainly won’t find anything new in this Celtic drama rife with predictable sins and one-dimensional people. (Not every character need be beautiful and brimming with passion.) The only love affair that rings true is the author’s fawning adoration of Ireland.
Overwrought and flimsy—but at least the coastal scenery is lovely.Pub Date: July 4, 2006
ISBN: 0-553-80419-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2006
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these...
Figuratively and literally shattering moments of hoRRRRRipilication in Chamberlain, Maine where stones fly from the sky rather than from the hands of the villagers (as they did in "The Lottery," although the latter are equal to other forms of persecution).
All beginning when Carrie White discovers a gift with telekinetic powers (later established as a genetic fact), after she menstruates in full ignorance of the process and thinks she is bleeding to death while the other monsters in the high school locker room bait and bully her mercilessly. Carrie is the only child of a fundamentalist freak mother who has brought her up with a concept of sin which no blood of the Lamb can wash clean. In addition to a sympathetic principal and gym teacher, there's one girl who wishes to atone and turns her date for the spring ball over to Carrie who for the first time is happy, beautiful and acknowledged as such. But there will be hell to pay for this success—not only her mother but two youngsters who douse her in buckets of fresh-killed pig blood so that Carrie once again uses her "wild talent," flexes her mind and a complete catastrophe (explosion and an uncontrolled fire) virtually destroys the town.
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these youngsters who once ate peanut butter now scrawl "Carrie White eats shit." But as they still say around here, "Sit a spell and collect yourself."Pub Date: April 8, 1974
ISBN: 0385086954
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1974
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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