Kinder, winner of the first Willa Cather Fiction Prize, offers 15 stories about growing up female and surviving adulthood as a proto-feminist in the bootheel of Missouri—stories that are sharply textured with family quarrels and homage to bluegrass and gospel music. Many of the pieces concern Cora Leban, a mother, musician, and independent spirit who grows up (and out of) a community where some women—Anna, for instance—``did not know how she had lived without church.'' Music is the only redemption; love fails to suture pain or provide much in the way of relief. In the book's early stories, the narrow, judgmental voice of the community makes itself heard- -especially in ``Craryville Box''—and a range of voices dramatize family conflicts and a shifting balance of power in which women hold their own—against a rigid and failing husband in the title story, against a son who takes after the father who deserted him in ``Bloodlines.'' These early stories also establish the down-and-out texture of life in Missouri's bootheel—using the outhouse, hunting for leeches, learning not to trust. In ``Cora's Room,'' Cora returns home to her bitter mother Oida to find the separation between them too great to bridge; in ``The Prowler,'' Cora, slowly losing her hearing, borrows a .38 from her ex-husband, a cop ``on the rape detail,'' and waits, refusing to draw her drapes, for a Peeping Tom. In ``Cora's Letter,'' the last summing-up story, Cora writes to her mother about a lover who was arrested for murder and about ``the kind of thing mothers and daughters don't talk about.'' At their best, these hardscrabble stories—grounded in bleakness but with moments of beauty—have a delicacy of vision and acute sense of place reminiscent of Olga Masters.
Pub Date: Sept. 15, 1991
ISBN: 0-9627460-2-9
Page Count: 141
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1991
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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
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