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Troubled Waters

Name: Troubled Waters
Author: R. Wesley Clement
ISBN: 978-1-4602-7840-6

by R. Wesley Clement ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 28, 2015

A sharply written seaside story that could have had more wind in its sails, had it relied on better navigation charts.

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In Clement’s (This Old House, 2011) novel, disparate characters’ lives intersect at a friendly neighborhood bar in Portland, Maine.

“When you’re weary, feeling small / When tears are in your eyes, I will dry them all”: so goes the Simon & Garfunkel classic “Bridge over Troubled Water.” These lines seem to apply to Sean, a lively young businessman and lifetime Mainer whose plans for a vibrant life with his wife, Stella, are cut short when he loses his legs in a hit-and-run. However, he still derives a measure of comfort from his bar, Troubled Waters, in the Old Port section of Portland, which he operates with his business partner, Jacob Morrison. Their 23-year-old waitress, simply named Elvis, has an intriguing back story of her own that’s slowly teased out over the course of the novel. At Troubled Waters, it seems that everybody knows your name—but scratch the veneer of the Cheers-like atmosphere and one finds a hint of menace lurking in the form of bar regular Quentin T. Spence, a troubled academic whose unbridled lust has disturbing consequences. Clement astutely observes each character’s back story, even if Elvis and Quentin get the lion’s share of the spotlight, and the crisp prose is tinged with just the right amount of suspense and intrigue. Despite the careful execution, however, these individual elements stop short of seamlessly combining into a larger tapestry. The novel doesn’t clearly establish the different characters’ interconnectedness before going off on various plot tangents. For example, the story starts by focusing on Sean’s troubles but before long, he’s just part of the scenery when the action shifts completely to Elvis and, later, Quentin’s skin-crawling behavior. After a few more detours, the novel becomes a slickly executed police procedural, but it’s not quite clear whether that’s what the author—and readers—signed up for.

A sharply written seaside story that could have had more wind in its sails, had it relied on better navigation charts.

Pub Date: Dec. 28, 2015

ISBN: 978-1-4602-7840-6

Page Count: 306

Publisher: FriesenPress

Review Posted Online: March 18, 2016

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

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.

Pub Date: July 11, 1960

ISBN: 0060935464

Page Count: 323

Publisher: Lippincott

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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LONESOME DOVE

A NOVEL (SIMON & SCHUSTER CLASSICS)

by Larry McMurtry ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 1985

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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.