An entertaining oater that’s also a subtle study in understated manliness.
Horse racing is a nail-biting proposition—especially in the bandit-infested Old California of this tense Western.
Fed up with training other people’s horses in Kentucky, Cole Copeland has taken to the local California racing circuit with his trusty steed. It’s a sport of artfully manipulated appearances as well as hurtling horseflesh; often posing as an Arkansas rube, Cole pits his well-trained equine ringer against the actual rubes’ favorite nags in informal races and cleans up on the resulting bets. He makes a living, garnering bags full of gold coins that, in the 1870s, attract plenty of desperadoes whom he fends off with his trusty Winchester and two pistols, one for show and another hidden to shoot. A mysterious man named Sandy, who may or may not be a bandit chieftain—but so might anyone—steers him towards the big race-match gathering at Tehachapi that draws the best horses and the richest swells in the California racing scene and where an unknown quantity like Cole might clean up. With his excitable 14-year-old groom Jeremy, Cole plunges into the byzantine swirl of Tehachapi and takes readers along into this arcane and fascinating world. The race itself is almost secondary to the negotiations leading up to it, in which Cole craftily susses out the competition and maneuvers them into the perfect race, with high stakes and a field so good that the oddsmakers don’t realize he can win. Writing with a clipped, precise prose, professional horse-trainer Porter fits plenty of suspenseful showdowns and hair-raising gunfights into this galloping yarn, but balances it with absorbing lore on his craft. Protagonist Cole makes an appealing man in the saddle—he’s cool, wary, always at work on a back-up plan to his back-up plan and a hard-nosed businessman who sees a horse as a moneymaking investment—but he’s also sublimely attuned to the equine soul.
An entertaining oater that’s also a subtle study in understated manliness.Pub Date: April 16, 2011
ISBN: 978-1453705933
Page Count: 236
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 1, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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