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PAPER WINGS

Name: PAPER WINGS
Author: Marly Swick
ISBN: 0-06-017434-X

by Marly Swick ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 1996

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A moving first novel, about family life and its challenges and discontents, from an acclaimed short-story writer (The Summer Before the Summer of Love, 1995, etc.). It's the story of the Keller family of Madison, Wisconsin, throughout the 1960s and, briefly, afterward—especially during the watershed year 1963, when 12-year-old Suzanne Keller's high-strung mother Helen (that's right), helplessly mourning the death of her idol John F. Kennedy, retreats into the pattern of depression and eccentricity believed to date from her adolescence, when Helen's parents were killed in an automobile accident. The novel thereafter weaves forward and backward in time, as Suzanne (who narrates) recalls and evaluates her beautiful, unstable mother's effects on her patient husband Glen (a curious, conscientious optometrist), Suzanne'sclothes-and-boycrazy older sister Bonnie, and a vividly characterized clutch of neighbors and best friends, including a farmhouse full of disapproving paternal in-laws whose intolerant views of the free-spirited Helen emerge during a stingingly evoked Thanksgiving dinner. Swick's beautifully controlled plot shifts into high gear when Helen ``escapes'' with Suzanne in tow on an unannounced trip to her Nebraska hometown, and especially as the latter begins to piece together the long-buried facts of her mother's girlhood losses and later traumas. The car trip episode is perhaps a trifle too reminiscent of Mona Simpson's Anywhere But Here, and Swick's generally successful use of '60s touchstone movies and music and culture references to denote specific years betray her into what seem like anachronisms (was the term ``wimp'' around much in 1963? was the phrase ``it really sucks'' really current in 1969?). These are the only blemishes on a novel that renders the stuttering momentum of family dynamics with equally warm emotion and relentless clarity. A heartening breakthrough into the longer form by a writer who's already a short-story master, and grows more accomplished with each book she produces. (Regional author tour)

Pub Date: July 1, 1996

ISBN: 0-06-017434-X

Page Count: 288

Publisher: HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1996

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
EVENING NEWS
by Marly Swick

- BOOK REVIEW
THE SUMMER BEFORE THE SUMMER OF LOVE
by Marly Swick

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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

- BOOK REVIEW
THE LAND OF SWEET FOREVER
by Harper Lee ; edited by Casey Cep

- BOOK REVIEW
GO SET A WATCHMAN
by Harper Lee

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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.