A potentially gripping tale undermined by its frustrating heroine.
A young lawyer neglects her friends and family as she stubbornly tries to help a sex trafficking victim in Carr’s (The Vernazza Effect, 2013) second novel.
Attorney Tara Collins unexpectedly receives a large sum of money as a gift from her newly married best friend Ella. With it, she decides to create a nonprofit foundation within her San Francisco law firm to help those who can’t afford legal aid. Its board is made up of Assistant District Attorney Brett, who happens to be Tara’s secret boyfriend; social worker Chad; and journalist Jordan (who bizarrely reports on both the law firm and the foundation, in a seemingly textbook case of conflict of interest). For the foundation’s fourth case, she convinces the board members to take on Ashlee, a young teen who was found beaten and left for dead in an alley. Ashlee is too frightened to talk, so Tara begins spending nights with her in the hospital and playing private detective in between visits. Her actions begin to concern Brett and her other colleagues, who insist that she involve the police. Some readers will admire the go-it-alone bravado of the workaholic, emotional Tara. Others, however, may be less impressed by her lack of sense as she jeopardizes her relationships as well as the personal safety of everyone around her. She also undermines her chances of putting away a very bad man due to her dogged insistence on solving the case alone. On the surface, it’s a noble cause, but it may become difficult for readers to applaud her as she continues to take misstep after misstep. (Relief comes, however, when the narrative focuses on Alexander, Ashlee’s high-flying pimp.) The novel’s opening and closing chapters are also lengthy and uninspired. However, patient readers may still find a compelling story about surviving forced prostitution here.
A potentially gripping tale undermined by its frustrating heroine.Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-0692201022
Page Count: 412
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 18, 2014
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
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