OCTOBER SUITE

Name: OCTOBER SUITE
Author: Maxine Clair
ISBN: 0-375-50630-6

by Maxine Clair ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 9, 2001

Some fine descriptive passages and a refreshingly nuanced portrait of African-Americans who are not obsessed by race, but...

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First-novelist Clair expands on several stories from Rattlebone (1994) to chronicle a decade in the life of a midwestern schoolteacher.

In the fall of 1950, 23-year-old October Brown is about to begin her second year at the Stowe School and pleased to be living in the most respectable boardinghouse for African-Americans in Wyandotte County, Kansas. Respectability is important to October, whose father Franklin murdered wife Carrie in 1931 while their two young daughters were doing the dishes downstairs. Aunts Frances and Maude lovingly raised the girls in Chillicothie, Ohio, but their refusal to discuss that dreadful night or its aftermath has left a lot of emotional loose ends. October falls in love with the father of one of her students and becomes pregnant; when he returns to his wife, she goes home to Chillicothie to have her baby. Older sister Vergie, long married but unable to bear a child, is only too happy to take David when the shell-shocked new mother shows no interest. October gets a teaching job in Kansas City, Missouri, where no one knows her scandalous past, but soon regrets giving up her baby. Over the years, tensions mount as October tries to find some place for herself in David’s life while Vergie fiercely resists every effort as a move toward snatching back “her” son. Awkward, pseudo-mythic interpolations by the girls’ dead mother add nothing to the textured but self-conscious narrative, which calls too much attention to details like October’s love of sewing and fashion. Hyped-up prose (“They wept . . . for their own pitiful, wonderful selves, their stupidity and their courage”) doesn’t make the sisters’ final reconciliation as moving as the author clearly intends, and tentative closure with the father they thought was dead is achieved through an outrageous coincidence only Dickens could have pulled off.

Some fine descriptive passages and a refreshingly nuanced portrait of African-Americans who are not obsessed by race, but the tale’s overly studied quality suggests that this material has been worked over one too many times.

Pub Date: Oct. 9, 2001

ISBN: 0-375-50630-6

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Random House

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2001

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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MAGIC HOUR

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2006

Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.

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Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.

Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.

Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.

Pub Date: March 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-345-46752-3

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Ballantine

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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THE CATCHER IN THE RYE

by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951

A strict report, worthy of sympathy.

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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.