A tender family tribute that adds domestic context to the usual Spanish flu narrative.
When her fiance is drafted to serve in World War I, a young woman accepts a teaching position in Michigan, where she winds up fighting a different enemy on the homefront.
Stone’s debut novel is both a fictional memoir and a biography, written to honor his grandmother Lucile Ball and the love she shared with Howard Bridgman, a mutual devotion that sustained them during the war. Born and raised on a farm outside Albion, Michigan, Lucile met Howard in 1915, when both were attending Albion College. By 1918, they were engaged, but had to put their plans on hold when Howard was drafted into the Army. While he was away, Lucile, together with her best friend, Vera Smith, accepted an offer from a Munising, Michigan, school to fill the teaching vacancies created by the draft. Lucile and Howard wrote to each other faithfully. The novel opens at summer’s end in 1918, with Lucile and Vera on their long train journey to Munising. They are housed in the town’s nicest hotel, and although Lucile worries about Howard constantly, she is invigorated by her first experience away from home—until October, when the global Spanish flu pandemic, which was devastating the troops in Europe, reaches Munising. Within days, the schools are closed, an emergency secondary hospital is opened, and Lucile and Vera become substitute nurses. Lucile is the primary narrator of Stone’s tale. Howard’s story is interspersed through insertion of his actual letters, discovered decades later by Lucile’s family. Well-crafted, graphic prose conveys the virulence of the swift-moving epidemic. Lucile describes one stricken woman: “Her skin was severely mottled, covered in a rash of deep purple blotches. Her lips were dry and cracked and had a blue cast to them, her eyelids too.” But a persistent misuse of the first-person singular pronoun becomes irksome (for example, “The Dotys dropped Vera and I off at the inn”). While Howard’s letters add context to the love story, the narrative is most compelling in its depiction of a terrified homefront battling a deadly disease.
A tender family tribute that adds domestic context to the usual Spanish flu narrative.Pub Date: Oct. 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-73267-130-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: Oct. 31, 2018
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
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
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