What happens when you go into the woods, children.
Campbell’s masterpiece.
As ever, Campbell places believable characters into fabulously dark situations and lets the situation become more memorable than the characters (Midnight Sun, 1990, etc.). Although this time they’re an agreeable group of interesting folks, they too fade once the fun-ride is over. The strongest invention here remains the horror out of space and time that’s centered in Goodmanswood, outside Brichester. When the American professor of popular delusions hears of the madness of crowds in Brichester, he goes there and hasn’t left since—indeed, he winds up as an inmate of the Arbours, a home for the mentally bombed. Lennox is married to Margo, a painter/sculptor, and they have two daughters: Sylvia, a pregnant vegan who writes books about the weird stuff her father wrote about; and older daughter Heather, who works in a bookstore and is divorced mother to Sam, Lennox’s grandson, who hopes to go into publishing (to us Sam would be better off saving trees from publishers). In fact, Sam limps from an ankle he broke while living in a tree and trying to save it from being cut down for a bypass. But—the horror. Some time ago it was noted that a mound existed in Goodmanswood with strange lighted insects flying around it, while several trees around the mound held a lichen that, if touched, gave a person lasting hallucinations—the madness Lennox came to write about. Every now and then, Lennox and a group of fellow hallucinators escape from the Arbours and go off to the mound, along “the path that led to itself.” What is the secret of the mound? Far better than the secret, when it’s at last revealed in eye-scraping gothic type, is the buildup of a living darkness within the woods, a darkness blacker than night itself, with falling leaves that circle about and return as bits of blackness to their trees. And this is magically fresh and memorable.
What happens when you go into the woods, children.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-765-30766-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2003
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
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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