In Schinnow’s novel, a young farmer is willing to risk everything he loves in an attempt to save it.
Frederick Heinold’s mother died when he was 9 years old. Because of the loss, he bonded closely with his father, Emmett, resulting in a passion for farming that laid the framework of his life. Though he had always admired his father, he hadn’t realized what a consummate farmer Emmett was until 10 years after his death, when Frederick faces difficult challenges and has few resources to alter the bleakness of his future. He overextends himself purchasing expensive equipment and renting additional acres to farm in hopes of winning back the respect of his wife, Joann, whom he married five years earlier. Joann is a city girl, and though she initially loved Frederick for his common sense, she soon resents the hardships of farm life. She begins to travel daily to Lime City, sometimes staying overnight with her mother and eventually finding a job as a real estate agent. Two men strongly challenge their marriage: Eldon Mathews, a neighbor Joann admires for being a highly successful farmer (whom Frederick remembers as the school bully and who now wants his land), and Miles Richards, a handsome con man who quickly seduces his way into Joann’s bed and then into her savings. Set in rural Iowa, debut author Schinnow’s novel successfully captures the mood of the 1970s directly before the farming crisis, the outcome of which was the consolidation of land and the specialized farming of corn and soybean. Schinnow exposes the recklessness of the new generation of farmers for whom debt is common and the tenet “tried and true” no longer holds value. Though many of Frederick’s neighbors are affected, Frederick becomes lost as he searches to redefine himself. As Schinnow poetically writes: “His arms sculled back and forth like insufficient wings. He was flying over a land that lay far below. If he faltered, he would sink in a languid, spiral (sic) until he touched down like an exquisite ballerina. Would his memories follow? It would be nice not to remember.”
A cautionary tale of broken dreams and lives gone awry.
Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2012
ISBN: 978-0615601991
Page Count: 252
Publisher: Shell Rock River Press
Review Posted Online: July 12, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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
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