Humorous and charming tales with old-fashioned appeal and delightful images.
A collection of new and previously published stories about a girl and her adventures with her real and toy animal friends.
Squirrel Hill is a farmhouse in the country near a small forest called Briar Woo. Madison, the young, white girl who lives there, loves climbing an apple tree and exploring with her friends. These include plush animals—such as a male elephant named Ellie, a monkey called Sergeant Monk-Monk, and Kitty, a cat—as well as living ones. The first three stories here appeared in Clark’s (Just an Ordinary Elephant and The Bald Cardinal, 2018, etc.) two previous books. In these tales, Madison sets out with several pals to cross the forest on an expedition to find North Africa; Ellie wants to be seen as special for wearing a straw hat, but it’s his kindness that makes his friends think he’s “very special indeed.” Kitty, who tends to be self-centered and conceited, finds herself being kind to an unfortunate bird. The new tales start with “Big Audie and The Runt,” in which Madison teaches a bullying raccoon a lesson about sharing. In “A Fly in Kitty’s Whiskers,” she gives Kitty her doll’s eyeglasses to wear “whenever she wanted to look beautiful, or when she wanted to check her whiskers for flies.” In the final story, Madison’s African American friend Kaila has been told there’s a pink dog on Squirrel Hill; they ask around and finally find the canine. Overall, there’s a pleasantly cozy feeling to these stories, and they’re sometimes reminiscent of the works of A.A. Milne, although Clark displays his own distinct style. Although several of the tales here have a clear moral, they’re never blatant, and the author softens the messages by employing several moments of gentle, humane humor. The affection that the various human, animal, and toy characters show for one another is also sweet and endearing throughout. Driver’s (Just an Ordinary Elephant and The Bald Cardinal, 2018, etc.) black-and-white, beautifully shaded pencil illustrations are a plus as well; they portray realistic but very expressive animals, and they capture the magic of Squirrel Hill as a setting.
Humorous and charming tales with old-fashioned appeal and delightful images.Pub Date: March 15, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-79885-589-8
Page Count: 88
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: May 29, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PERSPECTIVES
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
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