The wry humor and raw emotional truth of JJ’s journey will have readers rooting for him from death to eternity.
When 29-year-old janitor JJ Lynch is tragically killed by a drunk driver, he uses tools found in a university lab to communicate with those he’s left behind.
McCarter has turned the grief memoir on its head by exploring loss from the first-person point of view of his newly departed protagonist, struggling to shuffle off this mortal coil. In life, JJ befriended Tamara, a scientist experimenting with electromagnetism in an effort to reach her murdered fiancé; after his own untimely passing, JJ uses Tamara’s experiment to send her a series of “Transmissions” from the other side. This storytelling device is original, and JJ’s transmissions are well written and often irreverent. In between, though, McCarter includes sketchily written “Interview Transcripts,” in which JJ’s loved ones react to his messages from beyond. Here, the author misses the opportunity to flesh out the experience of those left behind, more deeply linking the novel’s frame—the laboratory experiment—with JJ’s “memoir.” There are other missed opportunities, as well. Tamara’s fiancé died trying to tell her something, but this intriguing thread is left unresolved, as is another memorable episode in which new spirit JJ is threatened by a gang of ghostly bullies. McCarter has grounded his paranormal narrative in the “reality” of numerous accounts of near-death experiences, such as the “silver cord” connecting the soul to the “meat,” or body, but there is much for the rookie ghost to learn on the fly. While coming to terms with his accident, JJ is consumed by flames of rage as he seeks retribution for his death, sinks into a vivid, horrifying slough of despond known as the bardo (a Buddhist concept) and fights desperately to intervene as his best friend is about to be murdered. McCarter’s spirit world can also be playful and fun, particularly his account of the “Midnight Circle,” at which a motley assortment of ghosts gather to perform Shakespeare and Samuel Beckett. It is to the author’s credit that, even though his main character is “extra corporeal,” JJ’s heartrending passage, kicking and screaming, through Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’ five stages of grief for his lost life, is relatable for any reader who has lost a loved one too soon.
The wry humor and raw emotional truth of JJ’s journey will have readers rooting for him from death to eternity.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2011
ISBN: 978-0964209626
Page Count: 283
Publisher: Little Hummingbird
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
