An amiable, rather babyish fantasy from newcomer Schwarz, creative director/writer of a New York ad firm.
Second chances.
Charlotte Clapp doesn’t look like the kind of person who would steal two million bucks from the bank where she works. But her doctor just told her that she has a year to live, and she wants to go out in style. Goodbye, New Hampshire—hello, New Orleans. Binging on beignets and mint-juleps, Charlotte listens to the soliloquies, rendered in contrived Cajun dialect, of a bartender named Henri and decides she has as much right to be happy as anyone else. Moving right along to Los Angeles, fat, plain Charlotte renames herself Blossom McBeal and buys a luxurious apartment for cash, no questions asked. After taking in the sights—Grauman’s Chinese, the La Brea Tar Pits, etc.—she spends endless lazy hours basking by the pool, splashing in the pool (where she feels blissfully weightless and free) and strikes up a friendship with Skip, the pool guy. Forlorn when he fails to show for several weeks, she swims laps. When he reappears, she’s thinner. They go to Disneyland. They have fun. But the feds are after her, in what has to be the slowest pursuit ever of a rather noticeable fugitive, and so is her doctor, who has to tell her that he made a mistake. Fortunately, by the time they do catch up with her she’s already experienced a night of memorable sex with Skip, and learned many lessons about life, not only from him but from other colorful characters as well, including an old lady named Dolly who dies and leaves her ten million. Charlotte/Blossom is—ta-da!—a celebrity at last, but will the New Hampshire judge forgive her when she stands trial? He just has to, right?
An amiable, rather babyish fantasy from newcomer Schwarz, creative director/writer of a New York ad firm.Pub Date: June 29, 2004
ISBN: 0-446-53253-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2004
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
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