Newcomer Wallace, a former attorney, is more concerned with romance than the law in her fast-paced but shakily plotted first novel. LuAnn Hagerdorn is a daddy's girl whose great act of rebellion was marrying Eddie, a liberal political cartoonist, and moving from hometown Tallagumsa, Alabama—where her family still lives—to Atlanta. The other Hagerdorns include LuAnn's sister, Jane (who's unable to conceive and covets LuAnn and Eddie's four-year-old daughter, Jessie), long-suffering mother Gladys, and LuAnn's father, the imperious Newell Hagerdorn, Tallagumsa's mayor, most prominent citizen, and now front runner for governor. When Newell makes LuAnn (home with a reluctant Eddie for a routine ceremony in Newell's honor) a gift of the Tallagumsa Steak House, a local institution, only LuAnn doesn't realize that it's a bribe to get her back to Alabama, where she can be an asset to Newell's campaign. Largely because LuAnn's pregnant with twins and money is tight, Eddie agrees to a year's trial period in small-town hell; but, even though he gets a great job at the university and a syndication contract to boot, he hadn't bargained on the entry of Ben Gainey into his—and his wife's—life. When LuAnn meets this big-shot reporter who's at work on a book about the New South, sparks fly; and when Ben and LuAnn discover a shocking truth about the never-solved 1963 murder of two black students on their way to integrate the state university, Eddie is left out of the picture. With Newell surfacing as the crime's prime suspect, lives are thrown into turmoil, and it'll take all of LuAnn's reserves of gumption to not only save her marriage but to come to terms both with her father's role in the 30-year-old mystery and her own family history. The trial itself, though, is anticlimactic (Newell has a skeleton in his closet, but he's no killer), leaving the reader with a case of Courtroom Lite. Convoluted and mildly engaging at best.
Pub Date: Nov. 9, 1995
ISBN: 0-312-13571-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1995
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these...
Figuratively and literally shattering moments of hoRRRRRipilication in Chamberlain, Maine where stones fly from the sky rather than from the hands of the villagers (as they did in "The Lottery," although the latter are equal to other forms of persecution).
All beginning when Carrie White discovers a gift with telekinetic powers (later established as a genetic fact), after she menstruates in full ignorance of the process and thinks she is bleeding to death while the other monsters in the high school locker room bait and bully her mercilessly. Carrie is the only child of a fundamentalist freak mother who has brought her up with a concept of sin which no blood of the Lamb can wash clean. In addition to a sympathetic principal and gym teacher, there's one girl who wishes to atone and turns her date for the spring ball over to Carrie who for the first time is happy, beautiful and acknowledged as such. But there will be hell to pay for this success—not only her mother but two youngsters who douse her in buckets of fresh-killed pig blood so that Carrie once again uses her "wild talent," flexes her mind and a complete catastrophe (explosion and an uncontrolled fire) virtually destroys the town.
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these youngsters who once ate peanut butter now scrawl "Carrie White eats shit." But as they still say around here, "Sit a spell and collect yourself."Pub Date: April 8, 1974
ISBN: 0385086954
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1974
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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