The quirkiness feels forced, the sex dreary. Pritchard fans will be disappointed.
A middle-aged romance writer’s affair with a younger man feeds her fiction in Pritchard’s third novel (Selene of the Spirits, 1998, etc.), which aspires to comment on the genre.
Single mother Prudence True Parker teaches Advanced Personal Journey at an Arizona community college, not a gig that’s exactly making her rich. In the public toilet of her local library, she has a chance encounter with cross-dressing Digby Deeds, better known under the name “Mildred Crawley” as a wildly successful romance author. Whimsically insisting their meeting was “divinely ordained,” the dying Digby/Mildred asks Prudence to complete his Savage Passion series. All she has to do is flesh out the plots he bequeaths her, and her financial worries will end. Then, while volunteering (for reasons too strained to recount) at an Indian charity event in Oklahoma, Prudence meets Ray Chasing Hawk, a handsome if slightly androgynous Comanche with whom she shares a night of passion. Returning home to Tempe, she resumes teaching and raising her increasingly independent 17-year-old daughter Fiona. But soon Ray comes calling, and before long he’s moved in. Quite a handy coincidence, since Mildred Crawley planned her next book as a white woman/Indian chief romance. Pritchard contrasts that fantasy passion with Prudence’s less-than-perfect affair with Ray, who is angry, narcissistic, secretive about his friendships with other women, and perfectly willing to live off her money. Readers may be as bewildered as Fiona by her mother’s enthrallment, though she herself (seen as a kind of Prudence-lite) has not chosen much better. Prudence gains new respect for Ray after he undergoes the demanding rites of the Sun Dance Ceremony, and Pritchard’s depiction of the Native American culture, refreshingly politically incorrect at first, now becomes sentimentally reverential. When he discovers that Prudence has been using him as a model for her fiction, Ray feels used, but tensions are all too easily resolved.
The quirkiness feels forced, the sex dreary. Pritchard fans will be disappointed.Pub Date: March 16, 2004
ISBN: 0-385-50304-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2004
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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