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THE GENIE WHO HAD WISHES OF HIS OWN

Name: THE GENIE WHO HAD WISHES OF HIS OWN
Author: Margaret Harmon
ISBN: 978-0982114582

21ST-CENTURY FABLES

by Margaret Harmon ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 21, 2013

A fresh take on a timeless storytelling genre.

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Harmon (The Man Who Learned to Walk in Shoes That Pinch, 1993), in her latest collection of fables, tackles 21st-century vices.

Greed. Deception. Impatience. From Aesop to Andersen, such human failings have provided no end of material for masters of the morality tale. Harmon faithfully follows suit in her newest collection, and while the subject matter may not have changed, the circumstances of her characters certainly have, as the author sets her stories in the present day and provides modern interpretations. In “One Piece of Perfection,” for example, an idealistic architect’s vision of an egalitarian, green building is undone when several tenants undermine her design; the story raises the question of whether it’s worth fighting for equality if it will constantly be challenged. “The Woman Who Loved Her Husband” explores the cost of trying to control another person—even with good intentions. The young woman at the center of “Freeing the Genie” moves up professionally, thanks to some magical assistance, but realizes what she truly desires is to be in love. In many tales, Harmon plays with the interaction between needs and wants and the potential repercussions of ill-chosen words and actions. Although some stories tend toward the fantastical (genies, talking animals), most are rooted in real life and are, as such, relevant and relatable for both young and adult readers. However, not every tale provides a clear moral; Harmon maintains that the Victorians only introduced this concept “to make sure kids got the message.” The author also occasionally falls back on dated concepts and language. For example, in “Two Young Farmers,” she shows how two people can, with open minds, find solutions to seemingly impossible problems, but its references to “gold pieces” and “coppers” will likely take readers out of the 21st century.

A fresh take on a timeless storytelling genre.

Pub Date: July 21, 2013

ISBN: 978-0982114582

Page Count: 226

Publisher: Plowshare Media

Review Posted Online: Jan. 3, 2014

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

by Harper Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 1960

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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

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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LONESOME DOVE

A NOVEL (SIMON & SCHUSTER CLASSICS)

by Larry McMurtry ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 1985

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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.