A solid, character-driven tale of the wild ’60s.
Three women’s lives intersect during the tumultuous 1960s.
Set in Chicago in the buildup to the 1968 Democratic National Convention and during the convention itself, Travers’ novel occasionally seems plotted at random, with characters’ lives crisscrossing by chance and important moments being disposed of in a sentence or two. Fortunately, the characters Travers has created are all compelling enough that the happenstance plotting doesn’t derail the book. The strongest character is Sophie, a woman coping with the death of her lover and a world that either looked the other way from her homosexuality or openly derided it. Sophie attracts two women on separate journeys of coping with loss and finding renewal—Rose, a homeless woman trying hard to forget the daughter she lost and unable to keep from pitching in when she sees a garden that’s grown unruly, and Zak, a young teenager from the South who’s been forced to grow up much more quickly than she might have otherwise, thanks to a mother who’s far from the parent of the year. Sophie and Rose are vividly felt women that Travers imbues with all manner of rich personality traits and mournful memories. But Zak, who bears the burden of much of the plot, occasionally feels pulled from a shelf of stock characters. Still, Travers creates such a believable bond among the three women in a short amount of time that when that bond inevitably begins to fray, it all feels believably awful. Similarly, the ending becomes poignant thanks almost entirely to the characters and not to the machinations of the plot. Travers is an expansive writer and many of the book’s early passages are filled with long sections that could easily be condensed, but there’s a very good novel in here, just waiting for some strong editorial guidance to bring it out. And if nothing else, Travers’ evocation of ’60s Chicago is terrific, creating a real sense of a city on the brink of catastrophe, where the forgotten citizens reach out to each other because no one else will bother to do so.
A solid, character-driven tale of the wild ’60s.Pub Date: March 4, 2011
ISBN: 978-0983145806
Page Count: 276
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 23, 2011
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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