A sometimes-maudlin but imaginative holiday story.
A young boy’s determination to give a bitter recluse a gift transforms Christmas for an Appalachian city in Schell’s (Jack and Jillian, 2017, etc.) novel.
Gabriel Taylor insists that he’s 6-and-a-half, not 6, and soon to be a man. In Cumberland, Maryland, he lives across the street from Sarabelle Lindsay, a retired nurse who has become angry at the world since the loss of her husband, Irwin. She’s especially irritated by her neighbors Galen and Mabel Duckworth, who garishly decorate their house for Christmas each year and annoy Sarabelle with their cheer. Meanwhile, Sarabelle’s indifference irks Gabriel’s mother, Janine. But Gabriel is preoccupied with why Santa brings only a small present for his best friend, Becky, who wears hand-me-downs and whose family only occasionally turns on their Christmas-tree lights. There’s general confusion at Sarabelle’s attitude in this close-knit community but also gossip, drama, and even scandal. When Gabriel overhears that his father, Ben, has been fired from his job, he becomes convinced that his parents must pay Santa to visit every year; it would also explain why Becky gets so little and Sarabelle gets nothing. Gabriel resolves to negotiate with Santa this year, and he decides that Becky will receive his teddy bear and Sarabelle his stuffed turtle. This sets off an unexpected chain of events that includes wrongful termination, fraud, vandalism, and even attempted suicide before the boy’s plan renews an entire town with faith and hope. Schell was born in the real-life Cumberland, and he extensively draws upon his knowledge of the area in this novel. His impressionistic descriptions of life in the town are moving and downright lovely. The story offers a character-driven plot that creatively pulls together the travails of various families toward a single, cataclysmic tragedy. However, his dialogue is pedantic and precious at times (“Mr. Benjamin Owen Taylor, we’ll march, our Pitney Pistols drawn, straight to the bottom line of this fraud”), and the Agatha Christie–like solution to Ben’s firing is predictable. Otherwise, however, this is a charming, humorous tale about the continued importance of Christmas.
A sometimes-maudlin but imaginative holiday story.Pub Date: Oct. 24, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5396-7483-2
Page Count: 232
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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