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
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
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