An atmospheric debut, but the leisurely plot hinders the thrills.
One man’s business trip to a foreign country changes his life irrevocably in O’Quin’s debut inspirational suspense novel.
Stephen Cranton is in a funk. Although his job for International Courier Services takes him to exotic locations such as Java, Indonesia, he can’t shake the feeling that the spark is gone with his wife, Leah, and he can’t seem to truly connect with their two children, Randall and Tristan. When Stephen spots a copy of a self-help book called Fear Not and Live Hot! he hopes it will inspire him to make big changes in his life. One of the book’s first instructions is to “Do something spontaneous.” So when Stephen spots a limo driver holding a sign for another man upon landing in Indonesia, he throws caution to the wind and impersonates the car’s intended passenger, Carlton Easley. Unfortunately for Stephen, however, Carlton is the target of an abduction plot—a plot that is swiftly executed, and Stephen is taken by a group of three Indonesians to the other side of the island. With the help of one of his abductors, Stephen escapes and meets up with soon-to-be-retired Bible teacher Om Donri. The two become captives once again to one of the abductors, and during their lengthy ordeal, they discuss spirituality and faith. Stephen must decide whether to live in fear and hiding as he always has or learn to view his life in a new way. The book points out that O’Quin “served as missionary in Indonesia for nearly 14 years,” and his knowledge of the landscape, culture, and climate shine through here, creating a vibrant sense of place. Some readers, however, may be disappointed that he does not give equal attention to Indonesian cuisine. The characters, especially poor Stephen, seem to spend an inordinate amount of time waiting: exhaustively long plane rides, immobile traffic jams, prison rooms, even a cave. While this certainly provides Stephen the time to reflect on his life, many readers won’t exactly relish having to wait along with him.
An atmospheric debut, but the leisurely plot hinders the thrills.Pub Date: April 28, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-692-35013-3
Page Count: 332
Publisher: Mantap Publishing
Review Posted Online: July 10, 2015
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
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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