A promising first novel that offers a lighter-than-usual take on a deadly serious subject.
In this debut novel, a 40-year-old woman must reevaluate her personal beliefs, dreams, and aspirations when years of domestic verbal and psychological abuse escalate into physical violence.
Author Payne spent many years working as an advocate for battered and abused women. She’s woven that experience into this genre-bending novel about the choices and conflicts faced by the fictional Pinch O’Malley. Readers first meet Pinch the morning after her husband, Steven, has beaten her. Studying the bruises on her face, the full-time homemaker and mother decides that she must begin to reclaim her life—albeit secretly, in order to avoid her husband’s wrath. She answers an ad looking for part-time help as a freelance editor, and embarks on a personal journey that defines the remainder of the novel. In an intriguing twist, the author peoples this otherwise serious volume with a cast of quirky, sometimes-bizarre characters; the most extreme is septuagenarian Lydia Wright, an eccentric former photojournalist who hires Pinch to organize her journals for a memoir she’s writing. The crusty, crass Lydia—who may have once “accidentally” shot her husband in the foot to keep him from returning to battle in Vietnam—keeps challenging Pinch to find the strength to extricate herself from her increasingly unstable environment. Overall, this novel tells an essentially moving story. However, with the exception of Pinch, her daughter, Katie, and her brother, Kevin, the character portrayals are exaggerated to the point of farce. Some sections read like quirky revenge fantasy, such as when Lydia places catnip in Steven’s hat, and he’s set upon by felines. This narrative strategy occasionally works as welcome comic relief, but it also compromises believability. Readers are pulled back and forth between theatricality and chilling encounters with Steven, who himself becomes more bizarre as the story progresses. However, the plot’s resolution is ultimately satisfying.
A promising first novel that offers a lighter-than-usual take on a deadly serious subject.Pub Date: Nov. 20, 2014
ISBN: 978-1503112025
Page Count: 294
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2015
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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