The Virginia-based Parry (Shadows of Glory, 2000, etc.) takes his time with a fairly simple story, but the telling is well...
A “novel of historical suspense” wanders pleasantly through its plot: a mystery involving the slaughter of 40 escaped slaves between Civil War battle lines, and one man’s attempt to find the killers.
Called to service by the Lincoln administration, Abel Jones sets out for a sit-down with General Grant just after the battle of Shiloh—and Parry’s opening scenes, with Jones finding himself caught in the chaos of battle, make a brisk start. Jones first depicts the dreadful deaths and the gore of combat, then moves on to speak to Grant and his good friend Sherman. After his interviews, he discovers that 40 slaves were recently found butchered, and that Lincoln wants the responsible parties brought to justice—regardless of which side they’re on. Jones’s job is to persuade the Confederates, represented here by General Beauregard, that solving the case is in their interest as well. He crosses lines and, after a brief scrap, succeeds in enlisting the help of the dashing young Raines, a Confederate officer who escorts Jones to the scene of the crime. Parry’s knowledge of the era is nicely on display here: his scenes of Corinth, Mississippi, and its sheltered wounded are vibrant, with a haunting eye for detail. Eventually, Jones and Raines are joined by Barnaby, Raines’s trusted sidekick, and the three ride to the home of the murdered slaves’ owner, the legless veteran Barclay. After untangling some vicious slave-abuse issues, and after Raines makes peace with his boyhood rival Barclay, Jones meets the slave leader, Mr. Hitchens, and through a bit of deduction comes to understand that the deaths were the work of a Union religious fanatic. The story climaxes in a firelit bloodbath.
The Virginia-based Parry (Shadows of Glory, 2000, etc.) takes his time with a fairly simple story, but the telling is well informed and evocatively written—particularly the wry, morally upright observations of the Welshman Jones, who predictably concludes that war makes animals of us all.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-06-018638-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2001
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
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