Beguiling, wise, and wonderful.
Bottom-tier circus enchants the big, empty West in the last days before mass entertainment.
With no safety net, Raleigh (In The Castles of the Flynns, 2002, etc.) takes a spectacular highwire route over the dangerous bogs of metaphor and sentiment, making it all look easy in this captivating tale of a decent man in a very hard world. Lewis Tully, orphaned young, flees his last adoptive home, taking with him fellow orphan M.J. Shelby. The refuge the two find is the circus, and they never leave that welcoming home. Neither do they ever get rich or make it to the big time—the manic prosperity of the 1920s hasn’t reached the agrarian West where Tully and Shelby ply their trade. And their luck has been bad. Tully’s last little circus was flooded out years ago, forcing them to fill in with horse-training work. But Tully, entering his 50s, is ready for a last try with his own Blue Moon Circus. From his scruffy camp in Oklahoma he puts out a call to the best acts he ever worked with, many now retired. And they come—because they love the life, because they’re proud of their work, and because Lewis Tully is a wonderfully decent man in the shaky world of circus entertainment. That’s also why Tully’s sister Alma sends him nine-year-old Charlie, another orphan who, started on a bad track, needs a man to show him the way. The way will be tough. Tully’s got nothing but some beat-up trucks, a patchwork tent, and circus wagons from the last century. And there are two competing circuses, one good, one nasty, on the same poor, small-town circuit. But Tully’s stars—ancient magician, whacked-out snake charmer, beautiful bareback rider, Russians fleeing the Bolsheviks, Tully’s long-lost love Helen—come through again and again, until they reach the town of Tully’s dreams.
Beguiling, wise, and wonderful.Pub Date: April 1, 2003
ISBN: 1-4022-0015-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Sourcebooks Landmark
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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