Lyrical and leisurely. Nothing new, but as comfortable as old jeans.
Heartfelt sequel to The Second Coming of Lucy Hatch (2002).
Spending a morning in bed with her true love, Ash Farrell, cabinetmaker and country-western singer, is Lucy’s idea of heaven on earth. Seems nothing can go wrong in their sunny little patch of northeast Texas—until Ash’s teenage daughter Denny gets dumped on his doorstep by her hard-hearted mother. On top of this sudden change, Lucy can’t imagine what will happen when he finds out that she’s unexpectedly pregnant—she’d assumed that she was infertile, since her husband, who died in an accident six months earlier, had always blamed her. He must have been wearing his boxers a tad too tight—but they hardly ever had sex anyway. Lucy’s at sixes and sevens, wondering what to do and when—or if—to tell Ash. Then Denny happens to overhear her talking about it to a friend, and the girl assumes that she wants an abortion. Well, no, Lucy’s not sure. Now that Ash and his daughter are discovering that they share a talent for making music, maybe there’s no place for her. She’ll have to run away to her own little house and think it over, leaving the Farrells to get to know each other at last. Like any country musician, Ash has big dreams about going to Nashville someday, with or without Denny. But there’s work to do first: someone has to explore the secrets of the past, this being women’s fiction. And the someone is Denny, who connects with the grandmother she never knew and learns why Evelyn gave Ash away when he was a little boy: she was the victim of vicious abuse from her husband and mentally ill to boot. But the tough old lady teaches Denny a few things about love and fishing, and eases the girl’s troubled heart, who finds that happiness is right in her own backyard.
Lyrical and leisurely. Nothing new, but as comfortable as old jeans.Pub Date: June 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-06-008163-5
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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