SNAKEWOMAN OF LITTLE EGYPT

Name: SNAKEWOMAN OF LITTLE EGYPT
Author: Robert Hellenga
ISBN: 978-1-60819-262-5

by Robert Hellenga ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 2010

Three reasons to love Hellenga: He’s a fine storyteller; he gives us new eyes; he restores our sense of wonder. Attention...

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He’s an anthology professor. She’s a snake-handling ex-con. What they share, in this gloriously quirky sixth novel from Hellenga (The Italian Lover, 2007, etc.), is a hunger for knowledge.

It’s a time of beginnings. The world is soon to begin a new millennium. The professor, Jackson Jones, again feels vigor after being racked by Lyme Disease. And Sunny is primed for a fresh start after six years in the slammer. Their stories are intriguing. Jackson did his fieldwork in the Forest, in the Congo, living with the Mbuti, or pygmies. He went native, sleeping with a young Mbuti woman; she bore him a daughter; he’s tempted to return. Sunny hails from Little Egypt (southern Illinois). She was only 16 when she married Earl, the pastor of a Pentecostal congregation that handles snakes. When Earl thrust her arm into a box of rattlers, she shot him in self-defense, wounding him, nothing serious. She’s now 35, five years Jackson’s junior; in prison she lost her religious faith but caught up on her education, and is now enrolled at Jackson’s central Illinois university. He offers her the apartment above his garage that belonged to his handyman, her dead uncle. They become lovers; there’s an astonishing scene, Lawrentian in its fervor, that invokes Greek mythology. Then Earl arrives to reclaim his wife. The story proceeds on parallel tracks. There’s a roller coaster involving Jackson, Sunny and Earl, which will climax with a second shooting and trial. Then there’s the story of two unconventional people with open minds. As Sunny gobbles up her courses like a kid in a candy store, Jackson travels to Little Egypt to pursue “salvage anthropology” and observe the charismatic Earl at work. The author affirms the validity of both backwoods magic and scientific inquiry on campus.

Three reasons to love Hellenga: He’s a fine storyteller; he gives us new eyes; he restores our sense of wonder. Attention must be paid.

Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2010

ISBN: 978-1-60819-262-5

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Bloomsbury

Review Posted Online: June 16, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2010

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
LOVE, DEATH & RARE BOOKS
by Robert Hellenga

- BOOK REVIEW
THE CONFESSIONS OF FRANCES GODWIN
by Robert Hellenga

- BOOK REVIEW
THE ITALIAN LOVER
by Robert Hellenga

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WITHOUT FAIL

From the Jack Reacher series , Vol. 6

by Lee Child ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 2001

Relentlessly suspenseful and unexpectedly timely: just the thing for Dick Cheney’s bedside reading wherever he’s keeping...

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When the newly elected Vice President’s life is threatened, the Secret Service runs to nomadic soldier-of-fortune Jack Reacher (Echo Burning, 2001, etc.) in this razor-sharp update of The Day of the Jackal and In the Line of Fire that’s begging to be filmed.

Why Reacher? Because M.E. Froelich, head of the VP’s protection team, was once a colleague and lover of his late brother Joe, who’d impressed her with tales of Jack’s derring-do as an Army MP. Now Froelich and her Brooks Brothers–tailored boss Stuyvesant have been receiving a series of anonymous messages threatening the life of North Dakota Senator/Vice President–elect Brook Armstrong. Since the threats may be coming from within the Secret Service’s own ranks—if they aren’t, it’s hard to see how they’ve been getting delivered—they can’t afford an internal investigation. Hence the call to Reacher, who wastes no time in hooking up with his old friend Frances Neagley, another Army vet turned private eye, first to see whether he can figure out a way to assassinate Armstrong, then to head off whoever else is trying. It’s Reacher’s matter-of-fact gift to think of everything, from the most likely position a sniper would assume at Armstrong’s Thanksgiving visit to a homeless shelter to the telltale punctuation of one of the threats, and to pluck helpers from the tiny cast who can fill the remaining gaps because they aren’t idiots or stooges. And it’s Child’s gift to keep tightening the screws, even when nothing’s happening except the arrival of a series of unsigned letters, and to convey a sense of the blank impossibility of guarding any public figure from danger day after highly exposed day, and the dedication and heroism of the agents who take on this daunting job.

Relentlessly suspenseful and unexpectedly timely: just the thing for Dick Cheney’s bedside reading wherever he’s keeping himself these days.

Pub Date: May 1, 2001

ISBN: 0-399-14861-2

Page Count: 384

Publisher: Putnam

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2002

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE SECRET
by Lee Child & Andrew Child

- BOOK REVIEW
NO PLAN B
by Lee Child & Andrew Child

- BOOK REVIEW
BETTER OFF DEAD
by Lee Child & Andrew Child

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.