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THE VIEW FROM HERE

Name: THE VIEW FROM HERE
Author: Lynne Hinton
ISBN: 978-1-58838-347-1

by Lynne Hinton ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2018

This field guide to both nature and life offers morals on grief, survival, and community in an often too-pat package.

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A divorced scientist trying to make sense of her life climbs into a tree—and stays put.

Forest Service worker Kate Sinclair is at a crossroads. Childless and newly single, she decides to climb into a loblolly pine and set up camp there. Her friends assume she’s going through a midlife crisis; townspeople think Kate must be protesting the imminent loss of the forest at the hands of developers. Kate herself admittedly doesn’t know what she’s doing, only that the forest is where she’s always felt most at home, even as a child before trauma changed her life forever. An avid birder, Kate tries to focus on the drama of the avian world in the forest—watching a horned owl pair roosting, searching for an elusive endangered woodpecker—but the drama of her small town keeps intruding. Some characters search her out to antagonize her, as in the case of some teens being kept from lucrative jobs working on the development construction; others come to seek her guidance, like the high schooler hoping to make a career of entomology. To top it all off, a mysterious man is watching her through binoculars from the edge of the forest, and she doesn’t know if he means to help or harm. Hinton (Sister Eve and the Blue Nun, 2016, etc.) does an admirable job of keeping the pacing brisk despite being limited to a single tree for the virtual entirety of the book’s setting. And Kate, as a protagonist, is messily complex and often frustratingly self-absorbed—in short, a real, recognizable person. But the plot is too often in service of the life lessons here instead of the other way around.

This field guide to both nature and life offers morals on grief, survival, and community in an often too-pat package.

Pub Date: June 1, 2018

ISBN: 978-1-58838-347-1

Page Count: 240

Publisher: NewSouth

Review Posted Online: March 19, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2018

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
SISTER EVE AND THE BLUE NUN
by Lynne Hinton

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WELCOME BACK TO PIE TOWN
by Lynne Hinton

- BOOK REVIEW
PIE TOWN
by Lynne Hinton

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WITHOUT FAIL

From the Jack Reacher series , Vol. 6

by Lee Child ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 2001

Relentlessly suspenseful and unexpectedly timely: just the thing for Dick Cheney’s bedside reading wherever he’s keeping...

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When the newly elected Vice President’s life is threatened, the Secret Service runs to nomadic soldier-of-fortune Jack Reacher (Echo Burning, 2001, etc.) in this razor-sharp update of The Day of the Jackal and In the Line of Fire that’s begging to be filmed.

Why Reacher? Because M.E. Froelich, head of the VP’s protection team, was once a colleague and lover of his late brother Joe, who’d impressed her with tales of Jack’s derring-do as an Army MP. Now Froelich and her Brooks Brothers–tailored boss Stuyvesant have been receiving a series of anonymous messages threatening the life of North Dakota Senator/Vice President–elect Brook Armstrong. Since the threats may be coming from within the Secret Service’s own ranks—if they aren’t, it’s hard to see how they’ve been getting delivered—they can’t afford an internal investigation. Hence the call to Reacher, who wastes no time in hooking up with his old friend Frances Neagley, another Army vet turned private eye, first to see whether he can figure out a way to assassinate Armstrong, then to head off whoever else is trying. It’s Reacher’s matter-of-fact gift to think of everything, from the most likely position a sniper would assume at Armstrong’s Thanksgiving visit to a homeless shelter to the telltale punctuation of one of the threats, and to pluck helpers from the tiny cast who can fill the remaining gaps because they aren’t idiots or stooges. And it’s Child’s gift to keep tightening the screws, even when nothing’s happening except the arrival of a series of unsigned letters, and to convey a sense of the blank impossibility of guarding any public figure from danger day after highly exposed day, and the dedication and heroism of the agents who take on this daunting job.

Relentlessly suspenseful and unexpectedly timely: just the thing for Dick Cheney’s bedside reading wherever he’s keeping himself these days.

Pub Date: May 1, 2001

ISBN: 0-399-14861-2

Page Count: 384

Publisher: Putnam

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2002

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE SECRET
by Lee Child & Andrew Child

- BOOK REVIEW
NO PLAN B
by Lee Child & Andrew Child

- BOOK REVIEW
BETTER OFF DEAD
by Lee Child & Andrew Child

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.