Underplotted, and a bit redundant. Otherwise, a powerful and promising debut from a diligent writer who looks like the Far...
A wistful, moving first novel from the Montana storywriter (Dry Rain, 1997; Blood Knot, 1998, etc.) concentrates with sometimes riveting, sometimes labored intensity on the troubled loving relationship between a brother and sister growing up, and apart from their parents, in a West Texas backwater.
Fifteen-year-old Austin Scheer is a gifted baseball pitcher destined to become “the next Nolan Ryan,” according to his older sister Abilene, a college dropout who was herself the real “fireballer” (and, being female, a Little League reject) and is Austin’s self-appointed “coach” and taskmaster. Austin tells the story of Abilene’s on-again, off-again relationship with their family, though he stubbornly rejects accumulating evidence that her sudden departures and irrational seizures of violence and bizarre behavior (which culminate in an unneeded surgical procedure and a near-successful suicide attempt) demonstrate a by-now diagnosed bipolar disorder. Fromm balances this skewed perspective on Abilene’s travail against Austin’s immediate (if as quickly truncated) success as the bellwether of his high-school team (a “near no-hitter” in his first start), and the frustrated efforts of their long-suffering father Clayton (himself a onetime baseball phenom) and embittered mother Ruby to reconcile “how all this started”—the mantra with which Clayton’s interminable family stories inevitably begin—with the havoc the unpredictable Abilene continues wreaking. There’s a lot to like in this suspenseful if claustrophobic tale (excepting the vividly depicted four principals, other characters are sketchy shadows): a brooding, doom-laden atmosphere; a subtly handled undercurrent of sexual attraction and fear between brother and sister; and especially the extended dénouement, in which Abilene essentially blesses her adoring, grieving sibling by releasing him (“You’ve spent your whole life trying to be like me, Austin. And now I take pills to be somebody else”).
Underplotted, and a bit redundant. Otherwise, a powerful and promising debut from a diligent writer who looks like the Far West’s answer to Alabama’s Larry Brown.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-312-20933-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Picador
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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.
