The sections about Joan’s parents are the best because they’re specific and convincing; the...
Contrived first novel sends a troubled American academic to a small town in Sicily.
Joan is the illegitimate daughter of Russell Severance, an American archeologist, and Simona Origo, an anti-Mafia photographer killed in Palermo by a car bomb when Joan was a teen. After years of living aimlessly in America, 35-year-old Joan returns to Sicily to investigate an archive of 16th-century probate records in the tiny town of Valparuta. The mayor who invited her in hopes of sparking tourism doesn’t know she’s just been fired from Brown University for attacking a student. It’s immediately obvious from Joan’s narration that she’s in serious emotional trouble, though we don’t really know why. Equally under the weather is Valparuta’s archivist, Chiesa, whose dilated pupils signal his drug use. Mysterious conversations with a menacing auto mechanic and the enigmatic desk clerk at Joan’s hotel suggest that something very odd is going on in Valparuta. Then, Joan discovers in the archives the confessions of people called benandanti, who in centuries past sent their spirits forth from their sleeping bodies to fight with witches and defend the village. Drawing on folk wisdom inherited from her Sicilian grandmother, Joan discerns that benandanti and witches still inhabit Valparuta, and Chiesa is one of the supernaturally gifted good guys. What exactly happens during these night battles, or what their purpose might be, remains unclear. The author has an irritating habit of dropping in peculiar events, like the request for Chiesa to bring a bathroom scale to the mortally ill mayor’s house. Pages later readers are more likely to be irritated than stunned to learn that “Chiesa has gone to weigh the mayor for God’s reckoning.” Portentous statements like this abound in Bloxam’s well-written but murky text, which is also replete with bad smells, bodily fluids, grimy hallways, burning buildings and other physical indicators of existential angst.
The sections about Joan’s parents are the best because they’re specific and convincing; the ongoing-struggle-between-good-and-evil is so vague and poorly motivated that it verges on ridiculous.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-57962-171-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Permanent Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2008
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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