A memorable look at the joys and tribulations of growing up in a small town during a bygone era.
A historical novel offers a collection of stories about life, love, and family in the rural South.
Evangeline “Vangie” Tanner has returned to her girlhood home in Collins, Mississippi, to mourn the loss of her beloved father. While digging through her memory box, Vangie uncovers an assortment of knickknacks that trigger sweet and poignant recollections of her childhood. Her memories are a window to the past, small moments that allow glimpses of larger social issues through a child’s eyes. There is ample humor throughout the novel, as Vangie recalls incidents such as her father slapping the preacher after the man startled him awake. There’s a thread of nostalgia as well, as Vangie muses on first dates and crazy relatives. But the cozy reflections do not mask the darker realities of a Southern community in mid-20th-century America. Women are expected to “get married and have a passel of children.” An African-American youth named Willie T. Clifford breaks off his friendship with Vangie because of their differing skin colors. The story about Rachel Katz, Vangie’s Jewish neighbor, is particularly striking. When Miss Rachel is attacked for her Jewish heritage, the neighbors murmur about the shame of it all. Vangie astutely observes the display of hypocrisy by most residents of Collins who refuse to take responsibility. This charming novel, a 2017 Faulkner Finalist, goes down like sweet tea on a warm summer night, a glass of refreshment and comfort. Pittman (Pony Tales, 2014, etc.) is an evocative writer. Her characters are well-defined, springing to life from the page in witty conversations and vibrant descriptions. Each story could stand alone, though they are all tied together through Vangie’s memory box. And each tale moves Vangie’s own life forward, eventually landing the small-town girl in Europe, where she discovers her future path. The author admirably balances the lightness of some stories with heavier themes of race, religion, heritage, and family.
A memorable look at the joys and tribulations of growing up in a small town during a bygone era.Pub Date: June 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-73231-740-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Serendipity Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
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
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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