A unique and informative, if not compelling, story hampered by too many nonessential details.
In Raffer’s debut novel, a man undergoes treatment for a life-threatening cancer and searches for his birth family.
It’s 1946 in New York City, and a young woman beset by tragedy makes the difficult decision to give up her son for adoption. The child, named Ken by his adoptive parents, grows up to become a well-respected doctor with a successful California private practice, a lovely wife and several children. As he ages, he longs to contact his birth parents, but his adoption records are sealed. When a strange rash appears on his skin later in life, he initially dismisses it; when he finally seeks medical treatment, it’s diagnosed as a rare form of cancer. Back in New York, Ken’s birth mother has built a life of her own, but she’s often troubled by thoughts of the child she gave up. Unbeknownst to her and her grown daughter, Sharon, Ken is in dire need of a stem cell transplant. Will the two families find each other in time to save Ken’s life? The author, a neurologist, draws on his own medical experience to scrupulously explain each aspect of Ken’s treatment, and readers with some understanding of science will likely enjoy this painstaking approach. Others, however, may find the technical discussions abstruse and yearn for a less clinical, more emotional treatment of the protagonist’s predicament. Raffer’s approach extends to his character’s lives as well, but often, the amount of detail becomes excessive and interferes with the plot. The novel jumps back and forth in time repeatedly to tell the full story of Ken and his biological family, with the majority of the novel devoted to Ken’s predicament. The members of Ken’s birth family, though richly described, often feel more like plot devices than fully formed supporting characters. In general, the heavy focus on his cancer treatment means that he, too, reads less like a complete human being than as a device for explicating a rare medical condition.
A unique and informative, if not compelling, story hampered by too many nonessential details.Pub Date: Aug. 26, 2014
ISBN: 978-1499053388
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: Dec. 9, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
© Copyright 2025 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.
