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HUNGRY HEART

Name: HUNGRY HEART
Author: Marjorie Meyerle
ISBN: 978-1453678107

by Marjorie Meyerle ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 21, 2012

An often resonant novel about choice, regret and absolution.

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Upon moving from the East Coast to rural Colorado, a divorcé parses the complexities of love in Meyerle’s (Bread of Shame, 2010) ruminative novel.

“There are many things which only the heart can grasp,” Jeff Stillman acknowledges as he reaches his twilight years. Indeed, his heart has long been a source of mystification for him. His love for his wife, Kathryn—the mother of his five children—is far from simple or wholly devoted, and it shares space in his heart with his love for Julia, a compassionate beauty and the wife of his best friend, Dean. When Jeff’s marriage finally fails—due, in part, to his extreme focus on his Manhattan law career—he starts fresh in quiet, sparse Kiowa, Colo. The home he purchases there, sight unseen, had once belonged to Julia and Dean, who founded an educational ranch nearby for disabled children. Jeff had always admired their altruism, but he’d always “blithely pursued the good life,” responding defensively to the notion that he might also practice such generosity: “Did that mean he and others should be rebuked for not being like them? No, he thinks.” His experiences in Kiowa, where he must rely on his neighbors to survive, force a profound change of outlook. The book’s central love triangle, and its idealization of rural living as a means to enlightenment, may appear prosaic, and some of Jeff’s observations (such as “It is time to be true to himself”) and predilections (including his tendency to get teary-eyed) verge on the trite. But the novel, despite its skirting of clichés, is also deeply insightful about love, human interaction, solitude, and even the ways in which America’s current economic and political landscapes affect people’s interdependency. Much of its success comes from the characters’ unpredictability and its intricate structure; the chapters alternate between modern-day Kiowa and slide backward from 2008 to 1969, depicting in reverse the gradual cracks in a marriage and a life’s mistakes.

An often resonant novel about choice, regret and absolution.

Pub Date: May 21, 2012

ISBN: 978-1453678107

Page Count: 316

Publisher: CreateSpace

Review Posted Online: Oct. 31, 2013

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.