An unusual tale that combines environmentalism and action-adventure.
An action-packed environmental thriller that portrays the complexity of relationships and the effects of tragedy.
In Powers’ (Each Unique and Fascinating, 2012) newest novel, Ben and Frances Singleton own and operate OrcaSpeak, an orca-protection organization based in the Pacific Northwest. Although the Singletons are in love, their grueling work hours and financial stress have taken a toll on their relationship. Frances befriends gorgeous Selena Campbell, an aquatic biologist, at a fertility clinic and believes Selena and her boyfriend, another marine biologist, would make for a good alliance with OrcaSpeak. Frances arranges a meeting between OrcaSpeak members and the scientists, but she fails to attend when her path crosses that of Donal Hopkins, a longtime member of an environmental-protection group. After losing his family a year ago in a tragic accident during a protest, Donal joined the group’s new Special Operations Unit, which conducts radical missions designed to raise awareness of environmental issues. He does it to honor his family’s sacrifice, but his guilt and grief blind him to the dangerousness of the activist group, which tasks Donal with setting off fireworks on a passenger ferry during rush hour. For this ill-fated publicity stunt, he brings his guileless cousin, Roddy Jones, to help him. Predictably, the mission goes awry, and Donal, whose van stalls at an inopportune time, ends up stealing Frances’ car and kidnapping her in the process. What ensues is a dangerous adventure involving OrcaSpeak and the scientists; Donal and his unwitting accomplices; and the potentially violent activist group. While the tale could be trimmed, the plot speeds along, and the characters have interesting back stories that shape the way they approach their lives and each other. As the drama unfolds, Powers skillfully shows how each person handles loss, either real or perceived.
An unusual tale that combines environmentalism and action-adventure.Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2013
ISBN: 978-0615656007
Page Count: 476
Publisher: Whidbey Publishing LLC
Review Posted Online: March 26, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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SEEN & HEARD
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