A finely crafted tale about grief and mother-daughter relationships.
A debut thriller tells the story of a woman’s reinvigorated search for her long-missing daughter.
Jesse Albright last saw her daughter, Sophie, six years ago near a circular rack in the kids’ section of the mall clothing store Zone. Every week since the 10-year-old went missing, Jesse has returned to the same spot with the irrational hope that she might find her child: “She’d always told her daughter that if they ever got separated, she should go back to the last place they had been together.” The intervening six years have been hard on Jesse, who frequently talks out loud to her missing daughter even when other people are around to hear it. She’s lost her husband and now toils at a used bookstore, where Star Silverman, who was Sophie’s best friend, has just begun working as well. Star grasps that Jesse is uncomfortable around her and that the woman is having an affair with a married realtor. The teenager also knows about another missing girl whom private investigator Kentucky “Tuck” Barnes has come to town to find. Star has her own guilt surrounding Sophie’s disappearance, and when she and Jesse begin to finally share clues, the girl’s case starts suddenly to seem a little less cold than before. Adelstein’s prose is sharp and haunted, and her traumatized characters are not shy about sharing their grim imaginings of what happened to Sophie. “Her decomposed body is lying in some ditch,” the surly Star tells another teen. “Or her bones are in a Hefty bag in some hand-dug grave after she was forced to commit vile sex acts on some pervert.” Some of the aspects of the plot, like 10-year-old Sophie’s deep interest in bird-watching, strain credulity a bit, but the characters are generally quite convincing, and the narrative is highly engaging. The devastation wrought by Sophie’s absence infects nearly every interaction. The relationship that forms between Jesse and Star—which becomes based on more than simply Sophie’s disappearance—turns out to be nearly as compelling as the mystery itself.
A finely crafted tale about grief and mother-daughter relationships.Pub Date: Nov. 20, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-948051-18-7
Page Count: 306
Publisher: Red Adept Publishing
Review Posted Online: Jan. 14, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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