Jones favors vividly observed wilderness settings for his fiction (Blood Tide, 1990, etc.), and this latest novel is no exception. It's set in the American West during the last days of the old frontier—when the slaughter of buffalo is ending one way of life to make room for another. In Wisconsin in 1873, Jenny Dousmann awakens one morning to a life radically altered by the nation's financial panic, as her mother follows her father in suicide at the threat of losing their farm. Her buffalo-hunting brother Otto comes home to settle family affairs, and Jenny decides to return west with him, unmoved by warnings of danger and deprivation. Joining him, his partner Raleigh, and their two skinners—the half-breed Tom and the southern cracker Milo—as the camp cook, she's content with her new lot until fate intervenes. Milo and Otto are attacked by Indians, but the southerner runs, returning to camp with a tale of Otto's death. Then Jenny saves Tom's life when the white men turn on him, only to be raped by them when he escapes. She rides off to search for Otto, finding him alive just before a howling blizzard descends; afterward, he's saved from death only when Tom persuades his Indian friends to take severely frostbitten Otto to an Army fort for care. He loses an arm, and his will to live, but Jenny takes him with her to stay with Tom's people, the Cheyenne, with whom she and Otto find respect and a new life. On a mission to sacred Buffalo Butte to save the buffalo, they encounter Raleigh and Milo, now serving as guides to a foppish English nobleman and his entourage, and old scores are settled with bloody finality. No major variations here on the noble savage theme, and no significant depth of character, but substantial research and sharp detail give this an arresting authenticity.
Pub Date: July 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-374-27759-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1996
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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