Overly sentimental fare that will probably find some readers to cherish it as a spiritual balm.
An inspirational message drives this story about an elderly widow, a magic rock and some transformed lives.
Since the death of her beloved husband Joe, Velma True’s hold on life has become precarious. She won’t even venture to her mailbox since finding his death certificate there. So the visit of a mysterious stranger to her little house outside Echo, a small town in the Florida panhandle, comes just in time. The nameless ancient who can “brush his fingers through the stars” gives her a small rock that changes colors, emits heat and light and offers a limited form of time travel. Briefly, Velma is back with Joe in the first year of their marriage, thinking: “This moment is forever and always.” Though the rock is benevolent, possession is not risk-free. There are bad actors out there, fallen angels who will try to steal it. Jordan’s previous novel, The Messenger of Magnolia Street (2006), featured the same good vs. evil conflict, but this follow-up is neither as well-written nor as persuasive. Velma must confront her irrational guilt over the four miscarriages following the difficult birth of her only son, Rudy, who has his own problems to work through. He’s a bed-hopping ladies’ man, movie-star handsome, unambitious, singing cheerfully as he delivers the mail on his rural route. He has yet to fulfill his potential and give Velma more than a careless love. Jordan packages a folksy small-town world of timeless rhythms, then adds a guitar-toting teenage runaway on a mission that will take her to Velma’s house and two lonely retirees who take off for Africa. Lurking in the shadows are evil, shapeless things, more laughable than fearsome, the weakest link in Jordan’s chain. Not to worry: Velma and Rudy will get the message (“No regrets”) and become new people, at peace with themselves.
Overly sentimental fare that will probably find some readers to cherish it as a spiritual balm.Pub Date: May 19, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-30744-670-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: WaterBrook
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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