Readers who stick around for the reveal will be rewarded with a tale about two women’s secrets that’s both entertaining and...
Old friends reminisce about their emotional high school years in this debut novel about acceptance.
Margaret MacGregor Monahan is happily married in Northern California, with kids, a husband, and her best friend, AnneMarie Calzaretta, nearby. What she can’t tell Anne is that her family may have to move to Minnesota, a secret Margaret keeps even as she prepares to host her friend’s wedding in her backyard. The two pals go way back, their adolescence documented in Margaret’s many diaries. When Anne asks to read the diaries, Margaret brings them out and recalls the beginning of high school. Summer camp brought summer romance, and her best confidante was Jennifer Cone, a sweet Mormon girl. In Margaret’s memories, high school is filled with mean girls, pep rallies, and flirtatious boys. But when teenage Anne comes to her with a secret, young Margaret struggles to respond as a friend, and as a religious person. In the present, the two women realize they’re each holding something back: Margaret confesses that she’s moving, and Anne reveals that she hasn’t been honest at work. As the two friends continue to prepare for Anne’s wedding, Margaret’s remembrances reveal that her friendship with Jennifer is indicative of something worrisome. The truth will bring Margaret and Anne closer, as teenagers and as the women they’ve grown up to be. It takes a while for this tale to warm up to its main characters, but once young Anne tells Margaret her secret, the stakes are raised and a compelling and uplifting story is revealed. The narration alternates between the drama of their high school years, and the bond of their friendship as adults, although the school portions sometimes drag (the Homecoming festivities take up nearly four chapters). Pop-culture references are frequent enough that the book could come with its own soundtrack of Van Halen tunes and modern Flo Rida songs. What could plateau as a predictable coming-of-age story takes an interesting turn when the truth about Jennifer is revealed, elevating First’s novel from a bunch of sentimental recollections to an absorbing read.
Readers who stick around for the reveal will be rewarded with a tale about two women’s secrets that’s both entertaining and surprisingly touching.Pub Date: June 21, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-940716-97-8
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Spark Press
Review Posted Online: June 29, 2016
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
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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