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DIFFERENT PEOPLE

Name: DIFFERENT PEOPLE
Author: Orland Outland
ISBN: 1-55583-763-8

by Orland Outland ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 1, 2002

Back to the drawing board.

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Ineptly written tale about two gay men whose lives intersect over the years.

Coming-of-age in Reno, Eric Hamilton and Cal Hewitt sense a powerful attraction to each other. In a park one day, Eric summons the courage to kiss Cal passionately and Cal recoils. The move was foolhardy, Cal protests, since it nearly sparked a beating from onlooking gay-bashers. Other forces prevent Cal from opening up to a relationship with Eric—in particular, Cal’s Christian fundamentalist parents and their homophobia. The men take separate paths. Eric embraces gay life in San Francisco in the ’80s as he fights through ACT UP for the rights of AIDS victims. Eventually frustrated by that group’s infighting, he travels to New York, where he quickly finds professional and personal success. He wins writing assignments from major magazines and the love and partnership of another man. Meanwhile, Cal takes a destructive course. Still closeted, he is able to have sex only when he’s on drugs (“He had resigned himself to his Sisyphean doom”). Soon he’s hustling the streets of San Francisco for drug money, eventually suffering a mental breakdown. Returned to Reno to recover, Cal learns that Eric has also come back home for healing after the death of his mother (from cancer) and of his boyfriend (from AIDS). Predictably, the two begin to forge a relationship. The point that many forces buffet gay love (or any love, for that matter) and that the love still survives is a strong one, however familiar. But rather than dramatize the theme, Outland (the nonfiction Coming Out, 2000, etc.) stalls his story with a seemingly interminable series of banal and ponderous authorial observations (“Power is addictive in the simplest sense, in that once addicted, you can never get enough”), clichés (“his writing . . . took wing”), stilted dialogue, and cumbersome sentences.

Back to the drawing board.

Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2002

ISBN: 1-55583-763-8

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Alyson

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2002

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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DISTANT SHORES

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 2002

Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...

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Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.

After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?

Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).

Pub Date: July 1, 2002

ISBN: 0-345-45071-X

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Ballantine

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

by Harper Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 1960

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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.