Well-written and intriguing.
Abandoning the rest of her family, a woman runs away with her daughter to join her brother on a man-made island/new nation and reflects on what brought her there.
“Welcome to nowhere,” begins narrator Roseanne Okerfeldt, nowhere being a salvaged Danish oil rig in the North Atlantic, bought at auction and conceived as an independent island nation called Mobility. At first numbering 38 residents, the population’s dwindled to 10. Rosie, 31, is there to support her wheelchair-using brother—34-year-old President Wallis Crim—but also because she’s a fugitive. Tracing the circumstances that brought her to Mobility, Rosie looks back on a life of unfocused impulse. She works retail, gets pregnant and married at 19, and soon has three more children. For child care, she depends on her mother-in-law, whom she both resents and takes for granted. She runs off (taking her oldest daughter) to her brilliant older brother in Canada, where she meets his mentor and plans to start a micronation. Heppner (This Can Be Easy or Hard: Stories and Essays, 2014, etc.) has an excellent ear for sly, revealing dialogue: Cathy, a Mobility resident, “smiled grimly and took a bite of her roll….‘I’ve had work produced. He Raped Me ran for three weeks in Portland.’ ” His characters are sharply individual and well-delineated. Rosie’s account of her life—a string of bad decisions that she doubles down on—is engrossing and well-told, though her victimhood stance doesn’t convince: “[I]t was never my intention to abandon my children. As far as I’m concerned, they abandoned me,” she sniffs. She implies they’re better off without her—the standard excuse of a runaway. Heppner’s skill creates distance, however: the narrative voice is articulately intelligent and observant, but Rosie is narcissistic and unimaginative. (She writes in her notebook, but it’s hard to see where her linguistic finesse comes from.) Also, her brother Wallis remains obscure as a character even though he’s the real reason for Rosie’s joining Mobility: “He’s why I came here, you know.”
Well-written and intriguing.Pub Date: May 26, 2015
ISBN: 978-1632260154
Page Count: 440
Publisher: Thought Catalog Books/Prospecta Press
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these...
Figuratively and literally shattering moments of hoRRRRRipilication in Chamberlain, Maine where stones fly from the sky rather than from the hands of the villagers (as they did in "The Lottery," although the latter are equal to other forms of persecution).
All beginning when Carrie White discovers a gift with telekinetic powers (later established as a genetic fact), after she menstruates in full ignorance of the process and thinks she is bleeding to death while the other monsters in the high school locker room bait and bully her mercilessly. Carrie is the only child of a fundamentalist freak mother who has brought her up with a concept of sin which no blood of the Lamb can wash clean. In addition to a sympathetic principal and gym teacher, there's one girl who wishes to atone and turns her date for the spring ball over to Carrie who for the first time is happy, beautiful and acknowledged as such. But there will be hell to pay for this success—not only her mother but two youngsters who douse her in buckets of fresh-killed pig blood so that Carrie once again uses her "wild talent," flexes her mind and a complete catastrophe (explosion and an uncontrolled fire) virtually destroys the town.
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these youngsters who once ate peanut butter now scrawl "Carrie White eats shit." But as they still say around here, "Sit a spell and collect yourself."Pub Date: April 8, 1974
ISBN: 0385086954
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1974
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
