Lowry’s novel portrays the rich life and culture of a hotshot crew but struggles to make that world’s inhabitants equally...
After failing out of college in her final semester, Julie joins a forest firefighting crew in this fast-paced novel.
Lowry (The Earthquake Machine, 2011) paints a vivid portrait of life as a hotshot, a firefighter specially trained in wildfire suppression. The Pike Inter-Agency Hotshot Crew must react quickly when a burning tree falls in the wrong direction or a walkie-talkie runs out of batteries. In such scenes of true-to-life suspense and well-rendered detail, it's easy to forget this is a novel and not a work of nonfiction. Indeed, the writing is strongest where it reveals the extreme physical endurance of and deep camaraderie that forms in a hotshot crew. Julie’s personal story, by comparison, is far less convincing. In the prologue, Julie explains her obsession with fire: “After my parents died I started to set things on fire.” When she's forced to quit her pyromania, Julie starts binging and purging as a coping mechanism. After joining the Pike crew, Julie is still sneaking out after dinners to throw up. Despite the depth of her psychological struggles, her compulsions fade away without ever being discovered, confronted or treated directly. Julie's social situation feels similarly thin. As the only woman on the crew, she fights predictable sexism to gain acceptance from her team. One particularly closed-minded hotshot, Tan, only warms toward Julie after she saves his life. Julie's story is rife with melodrama and overused tropes: She falls for a crew member, reconciles with her controlling grandmother and beats the boys at their own game multiple times. The seams show around the obvious plot devices. When Bliss appears in their camp, Julie feels threatened by the presence of another woman; after the two become friends, Bliss has served her purpose and is never heard from again. Characters are fairly flat, and when the story reaches its tragic ending, the reader knows it's coming and remains unmoved.
Lowry’s novel portrays the rich life and culture of a hotshot crew but struggles to make that world’s inhabitants equally real.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-62914-497-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 23, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
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
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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