A would-be writer finds cancer instead of a publisher in New York; she goes back to Alabama to die, but storywriter and anthologist Ebersole (Mondo Barbie, 1993, etc.) keeps her character alive long enough to inject a few poignant anecdotes into this otherwise maudlin first novel. Embodying the modern belief that only in many voices can one find truth, dying Cordelia takes shape through her conscious, her unconscious, and her self-specific omniscient narrator (``Without Cordelia, I cease to be omniscient''), making a desperate effort to tell all she knows. As the seventh (and last) of the name Cordelia in her family to die in the small town of Equality, she is part of a rich matrilineal heritage, the possessor of her predecessors' memories as well as of her own. But she is also the end of her line. Not inappropriately, most of her recollections concern other deaths: the brave, proud black woman Cora Johnson, visited on her deathbed by the now-famous writer Jane, whom Cora rescued from her white-trash family and inspired to become a storyteller; Adam, a bright young boy who learns about fireworks from the town's only Chinaman, then blows himself up within a few days of his mother's giving him his first chemistry set; bored young Mary Elizabeth, who drags a sister and her friend to see the local psychic: The old woman refuses to tell Mary Elizabeth about her future, sensing that the young woman will soon die. Intermixed with these tales of woe are Cordelia's brief encounters with the living: her visiting nurse, dispensing painkillers and geography quizzes; old Doc Campbell, himself dying of cancer; and her ex-lover from New York, who followed her home against her wishes only to sit helplessly by as she fades away. Engaging character sketches in the time-honored tradition of southern gothic, although the more contemporary conceit that binds them here is loose and ineffectual.
Pub Date: March 12, 1997
ISBN: 0-312-15106-3
Page Count: 160
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1997
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
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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