Like its characters, risk averse.
Two bourgeois bohemians shake up their tepid marriage, achieving only stasis in Gaffney’s (The Goodbye Summer, 2004, etc.) innocuous latest.
It hits Dash Bateman at another interminable faculty soiree: Her husband of 20 years, Andrew, associate history professor at tiny Mason-Dixon College in D.C., is a crashing bore. Not only does he say “em” instead of “um” though he’s not British, he’s a hypochondriac, beset by allergies. When he won’t let her keep a puppy someone has abandoned in the doorway of their townhouse, Dash and dog flee to the Bateman’s pond-side country cottage. At first, Andrew is too preoccupied with campus politics to register Dash’s absence. He could win a promotion to full professor and department chair if only he’d compromise his liberal leanings by helping a right-wing colleague. Raven-haired, wasp-tongued academic Elizabeth appeals to Andrew’s baser instincts as she tries to enlist him in her Machiavellian plots. Dash studies muskrats, photographs butterflies and gets embroiled in the lives of Shevlin, the cottage handyman, his wife Cottie, a recovering heart patient, and their hunky son-in-law Owen, clearly a salt-of-the-earth foil to Andrew. Owen is not only indispensable at closet building and kitchen-cabinet refinishing, he single-handedly works an organic farm and cattle ranch, plying Dash with duck eggs and homespun bromides. Dash commutes to Washington to run her photography studio with the help of new assistant Greta, who reminds her of herself at 25, when she was (improbably) a spiky haired punkette. Preternaturally calm Chloe, the Batemans’ daughter, would mediate her parents’ estrangement if only she could identify its source. Her bafflement is shared by a couples counselor, but readers will recognize in the separation a transparent plot device: Errant spouses are tempted by infidelity, though it’s obvious neither will succumb. A trip to the hospital occasioned by folksy Cottie’s arrhythmia and Andrew’s not-so-imaginary affliction is enough to corral the principals for the inevitable happy and edifying denouement.
Like its characters, risk averse.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-307-38211-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Shaye Areheart/Harmony
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2007
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
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
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
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