Seventeen stories from the late Australian Masters (The Home Girls, A Long Time Dying, etc.), varying in length and quality and ranging from the late 19th century to contemporary times. Before her death, Masters had finished eight; nine are the result of ``editorial alterations''—and it sometimes shows—but, even so, the most successful are biting studies of emotional and physical impoverishment. In the title story, sisters Petulia and Violet stay on into their 90s at their childhood home, their father's rose garden in ruins. The roses take on a symbolic, savage weight as flashbacks reveal a repressed and off-balance mother who foils one daughter's engagement. ``The Boy with Two Birthdays'' is a taut tale about Leo McGovern, whose parents change his birth date because a sister is born in the same year. When she dies, the parents ``were pleased they could now revert to Leo's proper age.'' Leo goes with his father to deliver a coffin and comes of age after his father breaks a leg. At her best, Masters allows indirect detail to reveal emotional hardship, as in ``Inseparable,'' in which a single mother is threatened by an only child's outside friendship. The proximity of the sea precisely reflects mood as the mother ``manages to keep even the smallest tremble of anger out of her voice.'' In ``Homesick,'' a young boy, sick at home, drags himself to school so as not to interfere with his mother's plans, though ``He often thought she [his teacher] looked directly at him...making him think he might be the cause of all the unhappiness in the world.'' Masters was adept at dramatizing a kind of helpless desperation through gritty, hardscrabble detail. Though not always fleshed out, and several attempts at humor fall flat, the finest pieces here are worthy companions to her earlier reputation-making collections.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1991
ISBN: 0-393-03031-8
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1991
BOOK REVIEW
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
