May prompt catch-up reading among the uninitiated.
Continuing rags-to-riches saga of Annette Goode Davis, her best friend Rhoda and the exasperating men, parents and children in their lives.
In this fifth of Monroe’s God series (God Ain’t Blind, 2009, etc.), Annette, 47, appears to have finally surmounted her destitute and traumatized childhood. She’s a successful collection agent, happily married to childhood sweetheart Pee Wee, the most prosperous black barber in Richland, Ohio. Their 11-year-old daughter Charlotte is well behaved and popular, even if she prefers pizza to collard greens. Annette is still surrounded by the wacky supporting cast Monroe introduced in the first book (God Don’t Like Ugly, 2000). Her mother, the now-elderly Muh’Dear, has reunited with Annette’s father, whose desertion of the family (in Ugly) for a white woman led to his family’s impoverishment and subsequent troubles. Scary Mary, the semi-retired madam who sheltered and occasionally employed Annette and Muh’Dear during their lean times, is still Richland’s go-to rumor-monger. But Annette ignores Mary’s hints that stalwart Pee Wee is planning to abscond with his new light-skinned manicurist, Little Leg Lizzie (so named because of her withered leg, the result of polio). Irony of ironies, Annette herself had suggested hiring Lizzie, to give Pee Wee an edge over a rival upstart barbershop, and to help Lizzie overcome her shyness. At Annette’s suggestion, Lizzie has a makeover, and the newly glam nail stylist soon has the barbershop clientele—and proprietor—wrapped around her cuticle trimmer. When Pee Wee leaves, Annette retaliates by taking up with former fling Jacob, but he turns out to be an abusive deadbeat. Meanwhile, Rhoda’s spoiled diva daughter Jade has returned from yet another out-of-state husband hunt with latest conquest Vernie, whom she doesn’t hesitate to batter when he’s too slow to obey her commands. Much back story from previous installments unduly burdens this narrative, despite the pleasure of watching Annette and Rhoda soldier on, wisecracks at the ready.
May prompt catch-up reading among the uninitiated.Pub Date: June 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-7582-3859-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Dafina/Kensington
Review Posted Online: Dec. 27, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
King goes non-supernatural this time—and the result, despite the usual padding, is a tighter, more effective horror novel. We are once more up in Castle Rock, Maine, ayuh, where the natives are striving to survive some earlier King visitations of the unspeakable. Recent arrival Vic Trenton, who has brought a big ad account with him from New York, is having a hard time hanging onto both the Sharp cereals campaign and his wife Donna, who has just severed an affair with a filthy-poet/furniture-stripper. Meanwhile: Joe Camber, an alcoholic auto mechanic, is angry at wife Charity for wanting to take their son Brett on a visit to her folks (he's afraid Brett will get a taste of sane family life that will show up Joe's madness), but finally—figuring that he'll have a hot time while she's gone—Joe agrees. And all of this sets the scene for some big, extended horror sequences hi Joe's yard. You see, Brett's 200-pound St. Bernard ("Cujo") has chased a rabbit into a big hole also occupied by bats, and a rabid bat bites Cujo's nose. Soon the dog is acting queerly, slavering, and going mad with a headache that warps his thinking about men: Cujo is lost in a mist and can't be found the day Charity and Brett leave. The first to die is Joe's buddy Gary Pervier—who lives just down at the foot of the hill from Camber's yard and crosses Cujo hi his own yard. Later, when Joe finds Gary's body he himself has but two minutes or so to live. And next Donna's car breaks down, so she drives it into Camber's yard with her four-year-old Tad: they're attacked in their car and kept there for three days, even after an investigating cop is killed. Finally, then, there's the dog-versus-woman showdown as savaged Donna, now half-crazed, kills Cujo with a ballbat—but it's too late to save Tad, whose heart gives out. . . . The inevitable film is going to be hard on St. Bernards and may even seriously affect their good-guy image. But, the ASPCA notwithstanding, there's no denying that King's three-day vigil in the carnage has a solid hook that will hold his fans; and his Maine humors do offer witty relief. so once again. . . the moola will flow.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1981
ISBN: 0451161351
Page Count: 324
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1981
PERSPECTIVES
An attention-getting writer (novels, Memento Mori. The Ballad of Peckham Rye, The Bachelors, and short stories, The Go-Away Bird) pursues her multi-personae interests, her concern with religion, and her refusal to allow the reader to be at one with her purpose. Here she disperses her story (a loose but provocative thing) over an extended — and interrupted — period (thirty years) during which Miss Brodie, (in her prime) holds young minds in thrall, at first in delight at the heady freedom she offers from the rigid, formal precepts of Edinburgh's Marcia Blaine (day) School, later in loyalty to her advanced sedition against the efforts to have her removed. Finally the girls grow up — and Monica, Rose, Eunice, Jenny, Mary, and Sandy, (particularly Sandy with her pig-like eyes) separate, and the "Brodie set" dissolves- with war, death, marriage, career, and conversion to Catholicism. But there still is a central focus — who among them betrayed Miss Brodie to the headmistress so that a long-desired dismissal was effective? In this less-than-a-novel, more-than-a-short story, there is the projection of a non-conformist teacher of the thirties, of a complex of personalties (which never becomes personal lives), and of issues which, floating, are never quite tangible. But Muriel Spark is sharp with her eyes and her ears and the craftiness of her craftsmanship is as precision-tooled as the finest of her driest etching. With the past record, the publisher's big push, and The New Yorker advance showing, this stands on its own.
Pub Date: Jan. 17, 1961
ISBN: 0061711292
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1961
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