A satisfying and unexpectedly soulful pioneer tale.
Avery (A Curious Host, 2016, etc.) reissues a novella first published more than a decade ago: a story about an intriguing stranger who arrives in a small Midwestern prairie town during the 19th century.
On a hot July evening, a tired Theodore Grant rides his two-mule–driven wagon into the dusty town of Cottonwood. He has traveled from Massachusetts, bringing with him 60 jars. His intent is to pick up a letter that should be waiting for him, drop off his mysterious jars, and then head to Santa Fe. The town, in which “not much ever happened that wasn’t planned,” is aflutter with news of his appearance. But beneath Grant’s well-mannered exterior, he carries a dark secret, and over the next 36 hours, he will experience both hope and despair before discovering his path to redemption. Whether through serendipity or providence, he meets Mrs. Quinn, owner of the general store, which also conveniently serves as the post office. During a late-night conversation, Grant shares with her the emotional and physical baggage that has accompanied him on his long journey from the frigid shores of the Northeast coast. In the process, he not only frees himself, but also provides Mrs. Quinn with a missing piece of her own family history. Avery’s tightly crafted chapters move the storyline quickly, but she lingers in them just long enough to efficiently capture small, ordinary details that vividly set the stage for each scene: “The uneven planks” of the wooden sidewalk “began to make walking difficult, so he stepped off to the adjacent mud baked-street and continued.” Describing a rush of gossipy excitement, she writes: “Questions flew about like sparks in a dry prairie fire.” There is no time for character development, yet with few words Avery successfully communicates the essential qualities of the primary players, from Mrs. Maggie Richmond’s pride in her hotel and the cuisine she serves to Grant’s loneliness. Referring to his two mules, he says simply: “They’re the only family I’ve got.”
A satisfying and unexpectedly soulful pioneer tale.Pub Date: Nov. 2, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4392-1584-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: BookSurge Publishing
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 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
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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