by Robert Drewe ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 14, 1997
As carefully composed as a period photograph, Australian writer Drewe (author of six previous novels, none issued here) frames the love story at the heart of this generally well-rendered tale with evocations of water and its arid opposites—drought and desert. When Will Dance meets Angelica Lloyd in Bath, taking the waters, the two begin an odyssey that starts in the late 1800s and takes them to the western Australian desert, where they are finally free to love fully. This contrast between water (cool, life-giving, but also death-dealing) and the desert (sapping and murderous) sometimes distracts from the understated and too delicately evoked story. Will, the son of a ``drowner'' in a long line of ``drowners'' who understand the ``secrets of irrigation'' in rural England, falls in love with Angelica, an actress traveling with her father's company. Her mother is in an asylum where water is frequently used in treatments. Will, a civil engineer, takes a job that involves laying a pipeline to carry water from Perth on the coast to the desert interior of Australia, where gold is being mined under extreme conditions—water is short and typhoid endemic. The couple set off for Australia, their travels described in alternating sections with a portrait of life in the horrific desert mining camp. Among the outsized characters are a German photographer, an American undertaker, a stubbornly dedicated Australian nurse, and a French doctor. The epidemic rages, some of the figures fall in love, others are weakened by drink or the struggle to survive. Meanwhile, Will and Angelica, their life riven by haunting undercurrents (her father abused her and other young girls), have to face their demons by bringing water to the desert- -perhaps a too cute touch—before they can truly be together. Clever, informative, exquisite in sensibility but cool in sentiment.
Pub Date: Oct. 14, 1997
ISBN: 0-312-16821-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1997
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by Robert Drewe
by Harper Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 1960
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
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by Harper Lee
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SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951
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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SEEN & HEARD
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