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THE SHORT DAY DYING

Name: THE SHORT DAY DYING
Author: Peter Hobbs
ISBN: 0-15-603241-4

by Peter Hobbs ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 20, 2006

Bleak, but profoundly beautiful. Hobbs is a writer to watch.

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A haunting debut limns the spiritual and social struggles of an apprentice blacksmith in 19th-century Cornwall.

At age 27, Charles Wenmouth is rather old to be learning a trade; he finds the backbreaking, skilled labor difficult, and the smithy’s customers are often rude. He also dislikes his disapproving, penny-pinching landlady and misses his mother and brothers on the family farm 12 miles away. Wenmouth can’t go home much, because he is in the final weeks of his trial as a Methodist lay preacher. “Four years since the blessed meeting when I felt the knowledge of God warm my breast,” he takes solace in his deep religious conviction, though he is disheartened by the poor attendance at church. In 1870, the grindingly poor inhabitants of Cornwall are disinclined to spend their scant leisure time in church; Charles, equally impoverished, guiltily understands their shirking even as he bemoans it. He wishes they would emulate Harriet French, a young woman steadfast in her faith despite her (unspecified) fatal illness. His visits to Harriet make Wenmouth’s hard life “bearable,” but his first-person narrative reveals that he is oblivious to tensions within the family: her younger brother’s dangerous restlessness, and the anger of her mother, whose pleas that he help the boy have gone right over Charles’s head. Drawing on the diaries of his great-great-grandfather, the author faultlessly recaptures the language of a painfully self-educated man grappling with loneliness, unhappiness and—as the story progresses over the course of a year—terrifying doubt. Magnificent descriptive passages evoke Cornwall’s natural beauty and reveal Charles as a thoroughgoing pantheist, far more cognizant of God’s presence in the landscape than among the human beings he finds so difficult to understand. The already somber mood darkens as a severe illness exacerbates his troubled state of mind. Hobbs delineates his protagonist’s crisis of faith with scarifying intensity, never condescending to the religious conventions of a long-ago age.

Bleak, but profoundly beautiful. Hobbs is a writer to watch.

Pub Date: March 20, 2006

ISBN: 0-15-603241-4

Page Count: 204

Publisher: Harvest/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2006

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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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...

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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

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TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

by Harper Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 1960

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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.