An overwrought excursion into the swamp of Southern race relations.
The death of a federal judge in 1968 leads the narrator of Wintner’s novel to contemplate and challenge race divisions in the South.
“Segregation is per se inequality,” wrote federal judge J. Waties Waring in a 1951 dissenting opinion in Briggs vs. Elliott—a statement that both helped pave the way for Brown vs. Board of Education and made Waring a much-maligned figure among the white elite in his hometown of Charleston, S.C. Wintner’s novel is an extended act of speculation about the reasons behind Waring’s transformation from segregationist to integrationist, told by a colleague, Arthur Covingdale, who undergoes his own transformation after Waring’s funeral. The story suggests that Waring’s public repudiation of segregation was actually an act of revenge against those who shunned him after his divorce from his first wife, Annie Gammell, a closeted lesbian; “Annie Gammell’s poor performance as a heterosexual wife may have been the original source of integration in the South,” Covingdale observes. Secrets abound—Covingdale, for example, burned a cross in front of Waring’s home—but Wintner (Toucan Whisper, Toucan Sing, 2002, etc.) approaches the plot points messily, drifting into dialect-heavy scenes and slow, wry depictions of Southern life. Eventually, Covingdale begins to fall for Aníse, the black cousin of Jim Cohen, one of Waring’s pallbearers, and their budding romance is meant to reveal the decades of prejudice that afflicted the Old South. But making sense of it requires the reader to navigate overheated, overwritten passages that, for all their finery, don’t make Covingdale and Aníse’s relationship convincing. Indeed, when Wintner descends into purple prose—Aníse’s sexual attentions are allegedly as “thorough as the drubbing Grant gave Lee at Appomattox”—the effect is quite the opposite.
An overwrought excursion into the swamp of Southern race relations.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2005
ISBN: 1-57962-123-6
Page Count: 268
Publisher: Permanent Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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