A satisfying, unusual novel.
In Mitchell’s debut, two lonely 12-year-old girls develop strong feelings for the man who abducted them.
Their captor, whom they call Zeb, keeps the girls hidden in a lodge in the Adirondacks for two months but doesn't physically harm them. He's eventually killed by the police and the girls are returned home. Years later, when they're both nearly 30, Lois and Carly May seem to have recovered from their abductions and lead fulfilling adult lives. Carly May's changed her name to Chloe Savage and has a moderately successful career as an actress, while Lois, a literature professor in upstate New York, also has an alternate identity. Using the pseudonym Lucy Ledger, she's written a thriller about two kidnapped girls. The book is successful enough to be turned into a movie, and the role of the detective who develops an unhealthy obsession with the intriguing kidnapper goes to none other than Chloe Savage. Chloe, of course, recognizes the plot as her story and begins to revisit her memories of Zeb and their days in the lodge, where the two girls bonded and competed subtly for Zeb's affections. While the story sounds convoluted, it's an interesting and unexpected exploration of the aftermath of an abduction that left invisible scars. At one point, Lois refers to a literary argument that “fiction should adhere to a standard of probability, rather than possibility." Everything about this novel defies probability. By the time Lois and Chloe meet again to talk about their past, many unbelievable things have happened, but this is a novel about stories, truth, and reinvention more than it is a logical thriller about a kidnapping. The voices of the two women are distinctive, each sharp and witty in her own way.
A satisfying, unusual novel.Pub Date: July 7, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-62779-148-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2015
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
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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