Despite its sometimes too-neat storyline, readers may find merit in this novel’s exploration of the challenges of aging...
In this novel set in 2012, a harrowing health scare for a family matriarch spurs emotional crises for her Fortune 500 company CEO daughter and musically talented granddaughter.
Muriel Bennett, a grandmother with a quick wit and a steadfast dedication to her own independence, has lived for decades in her cherished Pacific Northwest lakeside home. One day, her best friend, Catherine, discovers her barely conscious on her kitchen floor. While recovering in the hospital from what’s revealed to be a collapsed lung, Muriel’s condition prompts her successful, no-nonsense daughter Susanne to make the drastic, controversial decision to move Muriel to an assisted living facility. Before that move materializes, Susanne’s cello-playing daughter, Lilia—who’s hurt that she wasn’t called about Muriel’s health turn—intervenes with an alternate plan to keep Muriel at home, near the friends she dearly loves. As tensions come to a head, Muriel’s good friend Benjamin is involved in a fatal accident, which makes the book’s tempo falter. Eventually, the Bennett women’s disagreements uncover old pains surrounding Susanne’s brother’s death in the Vietnam War and a dark secret that’s long weighed on Lilia. In this novel, Carr (The Foundation, 2014, etc.) paints a portrait of three family generations that’s often pleasantly paced. However, it’s sometimes overly reliant on summary, and some plot developments strain believability, such as when Susanne’s Vietnamese translator and guide winds up showing her the very site where her brother was killed. The dialogue tends to favor easy aphorism over specificity (“You get one shot at life, Lilia,” says Muriel. “Please carve out one that brings you joy”), giving the novel the cadence of a well-worn fable, instead of a story about a particular family. Midway through the novel, however, Carr introduces a plotline that offers supporting dramatic tension, involving Lilia’s attraction to Benjamin’s handsome, computer-whiz grandson, Matthew, and their will-they-or-won’t-they dance.
Despite its sometimes too-neat storyline, readers may find merit in this novel’s exploration of the challenges of aging loved ones.Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-692-44979-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these...
Figuratively and literally shattering moments of hoRRRRRipilication in Chamberlain, Maine where stones fly from the sky rather than from the hands of the villagers (as they did in "The Lottery," although the latter are equal to other forms of persecution).
All beginning when Carrie White discovers a gift with telekinetic powers (later established as a genetic fact), after she menstruates in full ignorance of the process and thinks she is bleeding to death while the other monsters in the high school locker room bait and bully her mercilessly. Carrie is the only child of a fundamentalist freak mother who has brought her up with a concept of sin which no blood of the Lamb can wash clean. In addition to a sympathetic principal and gym teacher, there's one girl who wishes to atone and turns her date for the spring ball over to Carrie who for the first time is happy, beautiful and acknowledged as such. But there will be hell to pay for this success—not only her mother but two youngsters who douse her in buckets of fresh-killed pig blood so that Carrie once again uses her "wild talent," flexes her mind and a complete catastrophe (explosion and an uncontrolled fire) virtually destroys the town.
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these youngsters who once ate peanut butter now scrawl "Carrie White eats shit." But as they still say around here, "Sit a spell and collect yourself."Pub Date: April 8, 1974
ISBN: 0385086954
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1974
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
© 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.
