A carefully considered character study that digs deep to explore the ways the past can shade and shape the present.
In this dark, disquieting novel, veteran British writer Forster (Isa & May, 2011, etc.) toggles back and forth in time to explore the enduring effects of guilt on a child psychologist whose own difficult youth casts an unshakeable shadow across her adult life.
Julia spends her days interviewing troubled children in her clinic, trying to tease out the truth in conflicting stories and the root causes of problematic behavior, but in fact, she understands these children more than anyone may be aware. Though she appears to others a model of maturity—a hard worker, a homeowner, a newly appointed magistrate—she carries with her the unresolved conflicts, unanswered questions, unshared secrets and unspoken confessions of her own uneasy youth. Julia has followed a path of poor choices, either unable or unwilling to turn back or change course, ever since, at age 8, she was invited to serve as a bridesmaid at the wedding of her beautiful cousin Iris. She has acted cruelly, stolen casually, lied calculatedly, refused to acknowledge kindness and concern—and her actions have taken a toll. But did Julia, as a little girl, kill Iris' baby? And, even as she helps others correct course, will she ever find the resolve to go back and correct her own? These questions underpin Forster's patchwork narrative—and in a sense weigh it down and limit its scope. The accomplished author reaches deep to explore hidden truths and raises issues about resolving past conflicts, but in contending with these topics, somewhat heavy-handedly, she doesn't cover much territory. Thin on plot, the book may be best regarded as a character study carrying lessons about facing one's past, righting one's wrongs and using one's experience to help others. That message alone may resonate with some readers.
A carefully considered character study that digs deep to explore the ways the past can shade and shape the present.Pub Date: Sept. 2, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-60945-222-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Europa Editions
Review Posted Online: July 23, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2014
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
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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