The years whistle by with joy and gunpowder.
Complete with footnotes and bibliography, Llywelyn continues her historical series about Ireland’s striving to tear itself from England.
Again, Llywelyn follows that history in novels named after years selected as turning points in the unfinished revolution (1916, 1921, 1949, now 1972—and who knows where it will all end). With no attempt at lyric prose, the author nonetheless gets a lilt to her characters, who seem almost song-driven by their own voices, which are most intense at war or love. Llywelyn catches echoes of Dos Passos’s U.S.A. as she lifts and dramatizes events from newspapers and also from her own family history. Alas, of Dos Passos’s inventiveness she has none. In 1949, Swiss-educated Urusla Halloran returned to become Ireland’s first woman broadcaster but later found herself pregnant (by dull Father Cassidy or dashing Lewis Banes: She doesn’t know which), went back to Geneva and had baby Barry. Now Barry’s coming of age focuses the story on his joining the IRA and becoming a photographer, then moves forward through bombs and squabbles between Irish factions to Bloody Sunday in Derry and to Barry abandoning his peaceful hopes and again taking up a rifle. As the multi-novel nears our own age, the reader draws more deeply into the flow of events and the characters.
The years whistle by with joy and gunpowder.Pub Date: March 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-312-87857-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2005
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
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