A short but sweet tale that arrives in a foreseeable place, but provides an enjoyable journey on the way there.
In Farrara’s (The Royal Flush, 2012) latest fictional work, a former circus performer comes to terms with the successes and wasted opportunities of his youth when a reporter promises to thrust him back into the spotlight.
Clyde Herring is no longer the world-famous juggler he once was. His career with the Barrington Brothers Circus spanned from 1945 to 1989, and he was once a talented violinist and war hero, but now he lives alone in a shabby apartment in Reading, Pennsylvania. He never saved any money, nor did he ever marry or have children, although he did love someone once—Julie Pullman, now one of the richest and most successful women in the world. But the two haven’t seen each other in years, and the elderly Clyde has little else in his life, other than his daily routine and vodka. When it’s announced that the Barrington Brothers Circus is coming back to town, local sportswriter John Ryan gets the assignment to write a feature on Clyde. John’s goals are to increase publicity for both the circus and the newspaper, and to explore what Clyde has been doing with his life since 1965, when the paper published its first article about the juggler. Clyde later experienced a disastrous, drunken fall that ended his career and sent him into a downward spiral. The author deftly weaves together the threads of Clyde’s life, introducing bits of his past and present to reveal the consequences of the decisions he’s made over the years. The juggler isn’t the abject alcoholic that readers might expect, however. Instead, Farrara shows how Clyde brings a spark of cheerful humor to all of his interactions, balancing his melancholy with a refreshing self-awareness that will keep readers eager to see how his story turns out. Although the plot is a simple one, and often veers into predictability, it doesn’t make the juggler’s life story any less engaging.
A short but sweet tale that arrives in a foreseeable place, but provides an enjoyable journey on the way there.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-1434937285
Page Count: 98
Publisher: Dorrance
Review Posted Online: Dec. 17, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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