Despite the occasional clinker, this bittersweet world of average folks just trying to get by is well worth the visit.
Novelist White (The Blind Side of the Heart, 1999, etc.) offers an uneven collection of 12 stories about ordinary people suddenly blind-sided by the vagaries of life.
In the masterfully told “Disturbances,” a North Carolina doctor and part-time medical examiner is called out in the middle of the night to officially pronounce dead a young man shot in the chest by his Cherokee Indian wife. Inside the mobile home, Doc encounters the stricken woman trying to nurse her baby—and suddenly he has a different job to perform. In “Burn Patterns,” an arson investigator shares a six-hour drive across dark, icy Pennsylvania with an angry, snake-fondling vagabond named Rosemarie. In “Crossing,” recently widowed Margaret confronts her loneliness on a queasy ferry ride across Long Island Sound. Meanwhile, a landscaper has a most unpleasant task in “Ray’s Shoes”: he has to tell his neighbor, a grieving widower with two young daughters, that he’s becoming too emotionally attached to his own wife. “The Cardiologist’s House” takes us inside the sad life of a retired high-school teacher who, after two heart attacks, must watch from his living-room window as his neighbor and former lover struggles through a new affair. A pair of stories touchingly explore the fears of fatherhood: In “The Smell of Life,” Ira is awakened from a nightmare about his father's death when his newborn daughter cries; in “Instincts,” a widowed father has to explain the facts of life to his daughters during an outing to the zoo. A few pieces fall back on stock characters and tired situations: “Marked Men,” for example, is yet another comparison of Vietnam to WWII. The listless and rambling “Three Whacks a Buck” takes us back to the early ’60s, when fears of nuclear bombs and boys troubled the hearts of preadolescent girls.
Despite the occasional clinker, this bittersweet world of average folks just trying to get by is well worth the visit.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-8262-1294-8
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Univ. of Missouri
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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
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