Hard knocks in the high desert. Crazy luck—or coincidence—marks this squeaky desert romance.
Waller’s nostalgic, low-strumming latest novel (after High Plains Tango, 2005) is a wispy distillation of several hard-bitten voices scratching out a living in the Texas desert.
In one long, decisive night in the high desert of Guapa Mountain, not far from the Mexican border, Waller’s various gun-slinging, plainspoken characters will converge at the Clear Signal, Texas, ranch called the Two Pair, purchased some years before in a card-game bluff by the aging professional gambler Winchell Dear. At the housekeeper’s adobe near the main house, a coyote—a Mexican runner of contraband, in this case, drugs—makes his drop through Sonia Dominguez’s window, watched from a distance outside by the longtime Indian squatter on the ranch, Peter Long Grass. Peter senses impending trouble this night, as does Winchell, sitting up playing solitaire in the main house, and reminiscing quietly about ladies of yore. Meanwhile, trouble indeed approaches, in the form of two L.A. hit men with a hand-drawn map targeting Sonia’s house; like fish out of water, the city-slickers wear expensive suits and ride in a cream-colored Lincoln Continental with an arsenal of guns taped to its underside. And lastly, there’s the diamondback rattler making its deadly circle of the property. “So the high-desert night began to play itself like an old Victrola song,” the narrator sighs. Waller manages to keep the action percolating for such a slender affair, and dips into the backstories of the motley protagonists with sentimental glee. As a teenager, Winchell was destined to become a gambler by sanction of his father, a disgruntled border patrolman; Peter has grown disillusioned with the American Indian Movement after the “mess up” at Wounded Knee; and Sonia has endured a tough, lonely life since she emigrated at 15 and had to give up her son.
Hard knocks in the high desert. Crazy luck—or coincidence—marks this squeaky desert romance.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2006
ISBN: 0-307-20996-2
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Shaye Areheart/Harmony
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2006
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
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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