An enjoyable university tale for readers who appreciate an older heroine, drama, and romance.
A 50-something career woman considers her next move when things don’t go as planned in this novel about higher education politics.
Georgia Davis is the associate vice president of the public relations office at Georgia Central University, a large Southern state institution. Georgia has focused all of her efforts on her job, at the expense of her personal life. So when she is passed over for the promotion she has worked and studied for, she is furious. Instead, Paul Van Horne, the new university president and an Ivy Leaguer from the Northern U.S., chooses one of his old buddies from Princeton, Carl Overstreet. Carl had been in charge of public relations at a small college in New York but doesn’t have Georgia’s experience at a big state school or a higher degree. (Georgia is finishing her Ph.D. in public relations.) To her dismay, Carl is an alcoholic who speaks brusquely to the public relations staff, making enemies. In addition, he is extremely preoccupied with the fact that he is still in love with Paul’s wife, Elena. Then there’s Georgia’s friend Marina Roberson, a development officer, who has been inappropriately propositioned by an important donor. Her supervisor pressures her to continue meeting with him despite her discomfort. Meanwhile, Georgia must decide how she wants to handle Paul’s slight, considering whether to get to know Carl better and support him or try to find a new position. The discussions of sexual politics in the workplace are timely, and it’s always refreshing to read a book with an older female protagonist. While there is an almost overwhelming number of characters, the tale skillfully dramatizes the messiness of university politics. Some things that happen aren’t strictly realistic, such as some shenanigans with emails, but it’s not out of place within the gossipy territory of the story. The resolutions are satisfying despite, or even because of, some ludicrous plot turns. Pritchett’s (Making Lemonade, 2016) writing is clear and sometimes quite a bit detailed—she can give a lot of information on a subject that the characters are addressing. The tie-in to her previous work (Georgia meets that novel’s star, Missouri Rothman) is a bonus.
An enjoyable university tale for readers who appreciate an older heroine, drama, and romance.Pub Date: Dec. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-61296-979-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Black Rose Writing
Review Posted Online: April 6, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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