Summer camp should be full of good times that result in happy memories, but that’s not the case for 9-year-old Robert. The...
Debut novelist Sewell spins a tale of childhood sexual abuse and a quest for justice.
Summer camp should be full of good times that result in happy memories, but that’s not the case for 9-year-old Robert. The evil Mr. Diabolus, who also serves as the assistant principal at Robert’s school, punishes the boy over a trifling issue by first locking him in a closet, then whipping and raping him. Afterward, the boy, who was raised in a very strict Kentucky home, feels that he can’t tell anyone about the matter, although people around him sense that something is clearly wrong. Diabolus later attacks Robert again, this time at school, and when the boy’s anger boils over at home, he finally tells his parents about it. However, they don’t believe his story and severely punish him. The only joy he has in his life is a cute girl his own age named Ardee, but she soon moves away. Thoughts of her stay with Robert as the years go by, as do memories of his friend Willis, whom Diabolus also victimized. As an adult, Robert has taken up a habit of drinking to the point of passing out. Ardee reappears and proves to be a kind but no-nonsense savior. She leads him to a psychologist, Dr. Richie, who may help him cope with the abuse that threatens to haunt him for the rest of his life. Sewell paints a vivid, if frightening, picture of life in a conservative, religious Kentucky town. For example, the summers are depicted as so hot that the heat “barely abated below a thousand degrees, with humidity dense enough to write your name in the air.” As a child, Robert is truly trapped by the institutions of school, church, and home, and the author writes about this living nightmare in a quite graphic way. The scenes that demonstrate Robert’s compassion for Willis also stand out as being particularly heartfelt, as do the protagonist’s too-brief encounters with his psychologist. Sewell impresses with her unique narrative approach and dialogue, which breaks apart stereotypes about therapy. The novel’s latter half has Robert and Ardee plotting to bust the sexual predator, which is satisfying in a way, but the book might have benefited from spending more time on Robert’s healing process.Pub Date: Jan. 17, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-937273-18-7
Page Count: 242
Publisher: Martin Sisters Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 7, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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