Sexual tension on the prairie: A woman loves two brothers in western Montana—a godly one and a ``hell-bent boy.'' In her first hardcover romance, Williamson repeats an old theme: A Boston blueblood who's been battered by her father finds freedom and passion in marriage. Clementine Kennicutt, 17-year-old- daughter of a preacher who scarred her hands in order to save her soul, elopes to Montana in 1879 with handsome cowboy Gus McQueen. She takes a few clothes and her photographic equipment. But Clementine soon discovers that her life's passion is Gus's ``sweet talkin' heart-breakin' '' brother Zach Rafferty, a hero described in adjectival triplets (``long and lean and beautiful,'' ``disreputable and dangerous and handsome as sin''). Zach bets Clementine that she won't last out the winter. But Clementine sticks and gets stronger. She and Gus lose a son; eventually Gus is killed by a fierce winter storm. But she prevails. Getting her through the long winters are two friends: Hannah, the crimson- haired ex-hooker and former lover of Zach (``raw and violent and dangerous''); and Erlan, a Chinese mail-order bride with bound feet. All three find appropriate men and form a frontier support group that eventually defeats the copper miners polluting their picturesque town of Rainbow Springs. Williamson pioneers some feminism with her savage passion: Clementine, mother of three and prairie photographer, gets Zach's boots under her bed, but she learns that the secret to a completed heart lies within herself alone. Hard, raw, golden-eyed Zach is just a magnificent perk. This would bust a lot more blocks with a hundred fewer pages of electric stares and ``the frantic frenzied feelings that built and built and built with her chest.'' (First printing of 200,000; Literary Guild and Doubleday book club super release)
Pub Date: April 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-671-50822-9
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A kind of Holden Caulfield who speaks bravely and winningly from inside the sorrows of autism: wonderful, simple, easy,...
Britisher Haddon debuts in the adult novel with the bittersweet tale of a 15-year-old autistic who’s also a math genius.
Christopher Boone has had some bad knocks: his mother has died (well, she went to the hospital and never came back), and soon after he found a neighbor’s dog on the front lawn, slain by a garden fork stuck through it. A teacher said that he should write something that he “would like to read himself”—and so he embarks on this book, a murder mystery that will reveal who killed Mrs. Shears’s dog. First off, though, is a night in jail for hitting the policeman who questions him about the dog (the cop made the mistake of grabbing the boy by the arm when he can’t stand to be touched—any more than he can stand the colors yellow or brown, or not knowing what’s going to happen next). Christopher’s father bails him out but forbids his doing any more “detecting” about the dog-murder. When Christopher disobeys (and writes about it in his book), a fight ensues and his father confiscates the book. In time, detective-Christopher finds it, along with certain other clues that reveal a very great deal indeed about his mother’s “death,” his father’s own part in it—and the murder of the dog. Calming himself by doing roots, cubes, prime numbers, and math problems in his head, Christopher runs away, braves a train-ride to London, and finds—his mother. How can this be? Read and see. Neither parent, if truth be told, is the least bit prepossessing or more than a cutout. Christopher, though, with pet rat Toby in his pocket and advanced “maths” in his head, is another matter indeed, and readers will cheer when, way precociously, he takes his A-level maths and does brilliantly.
A kind of Holden Caulfield who speaks bravely and winningly from inside the sorrows of autism: wonderful, simple, easy, moving, and likely to be a smash.Pub Date: June 17, 2003
ISBN: 0-385-50945-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2003
PLB 0-688-13166-2 King Midas And The Golden Touch ($16.00; PLB $15.63; Apr.; 32 pp.; 0-688-13165-4; PLB 0-688-13166-2): The familiar tale of King Midas gets the golden touch in the hands of Craft and Craft (Cupid and Psyche, 1996). The author takes her inspiration from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s retelling, capturing the essence of the tale with the use of pithy dialogue and colorful description. Enchanting in their own right, the illustrations summon the Middle Ages as a setting, and incorporate colors so lavish that when they are lost to the uniform gold spurred by King Midas’s touch, the point of the story is further burnished. (Picture book. 7-9)
Pub Date: April 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-688-13165-4
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1999
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