HOW ALL THIS STARTED

Name: HOW ALL THIS STARTED
Author: Pete Fromm
ISBN: 0-312-20933-9

by Pete Fromm ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 1, 2000

Underplotted, and a bit redundant. Otherwise, a powerful and promising debut from a diligent writer who looks like the Far...

bookshelf

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

Categories:

FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
A JOB YOU MOSTLY WON'T KNOW HOW TO DO
by Pete Fromm

- BOOK REVIEW
THE NAMES OF THE STARS
by Pete Fromm

- BOOK REVIEW
IF NOT FOR THIS
by Pete Fromm

bookshelf

SUMMER ISLAND

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2001

The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...

bookshelf

Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.

Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.

The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.

Pub Date: March 1, 2001

ISBN: 0-609-60737-5

Page Count: 336

Publisher: Crown

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE WOMEN
by Kristin Hannah

- BOOK REVIEW
THE FOUR WINDS
by Kristin Hannah

- BOOK REVIEW
THE GREAT ALONE
by Kristin Hannah

bookshelf

THE NIGHTINGALE

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 3, 2015

Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.

bookshelf

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.