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
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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