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THE FEMALE COMPLAINT

Name: THE FEMALE COMPLAINT
Author: Rosalie Morales Kearns
ISBN: 978-0-9913555-5-6

TALES OF UNRULY WOMEN

edited by Rosalie Morales Kearns ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 2015

With prose that ranges from the humorous to the lyric and forms that range from the real to the magical, here is a vital...

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Thirty-six spellbinding stories about the active, spirited lives of women.

Female characters are still often relegated to the shadows in literature, written only as supporting devices to prop up the journeys of the male characters. This is not the case in this much-needed anthology. In Sarah Marian Seltzer’s “Ironing,” a story of first pre-pubescent love, the female gaze and female sexual desire are centered. Here, a schoolgirl's first crush—and her ensuing desire to change herself into the kind of girl her crush would like—deepens into a commentary on both beauty and male predatory behavior. In "Bringing Down the Clouds” by Kathleen Alcalá, Estela, the gatekeeper of a home for female survivors of domestic violence and their children, is drawn into a secret society of women who seek greater rights. And in Kim Chinquee’s “Physics,” a single mom working on her thesis tries to face the truth about a boyfriend who is no good. One of the most compelling tales is Alison Newall’s “Heart Like a Drum,” in which a staid PTA mom slowly transitions into a leopard and flees suburbia for the wild. The stories here run the gamut of romantic love, female friendship, familial relationships, and workplace politics. But throughout each is the common denominator of an active female character who embarks on her own hero’s journey. Structured in five parts (Resistance, Solidarity, Entanglements, Mother Figures, and Transformations), this anthology hearkens back to the groundbreaking collections of women’s writing published in the 1980s and '90s in a glorious homage. The editor is to be lauded for the effort at diversity that showcases women from a multiplicity of identities.

With prose that ranges from the humorous to the lyric and forms that range from the real to the magical, here is a vital addition to contemporary literature.

Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-9913555-5-6

Page Count: 328

Publisher: Shade Mountain Press

Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2015

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

by Harper Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 1960

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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

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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LONESOME DOVE

A NOVEL (SIMON & SCHUSTER CLASSICS)

by Larry McMurtry ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 1985

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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.