HALF A HEART

Name: HALF A HEART
Author: Rosellen Brown
ISBN: 0-374-29987-0

by Rosellen Brown ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 2000

Half a Heart is anything but half-hearted. We feel we can trust Brown's integrity and compassion; that's why her fiction,...

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The volatile relationship between a fortysomething Houston matron and the racially mixed daughter who hesitantly reenters her life is central to Brown's intelligent, affecting, if occasionally slow-moving fifth novel (and first since Before and After, 1992).

Miriam Starobin's embattled tenure as an idealistic teacher of history in Mississippi in the late 1960s climaxed when she gave birth to Veronica, fathered by Miriam's black colleague Eljay Reece, a militant music scholar who then contrived to keep the baby and drive Miriam away. Seventeen years later, when Miriam's comfortable marriage (to prosperous ophthalmologist Barry Vener) and motherhood (of their three children) begin to chafe against her half-guilty memories of Mississippi, `Ronnee`—now college-bound, and brimful of barely contained anger toward both the unsupportive Eljay and the unknown mother who `abandoned` her—arrives for a tense reunion, first at the Veners' New Hampshire summer property, then back in Houston, where Miriam's hopes that she can make her `other daughter` belong are cruelly tested. Brown handles this potentially preachy material better that almost anyone else writing today. Her style is a carefully judged blending of almost reportorial flatness with vividly rendered (restrained and overflowing) emotion, graced by frequent flashes of perceptive metaphor (Ronnee experiences everyday racism `like a chronic low-grade illness that sometimes flared up`; the charismatic Eljay basks in the `admiration of everyone . . . especially the women . . . [which] circled him like a string of little flashing lights`). Brown's scrupulous analyses of both her protagonists' believably crowded and confused emotions is impressively alert to the subtlest gradations of feeling, thought, and principle, and she makes us believe that all her people are tightly focused, exhausted decent people doing their fallible best to comprehend one another's `worlds.`

Half a Heart is anything but half-hearted. We feel we can trust Brown's integrity and compassion; that's why her fiction, even when (as here) it's intermittently redundant and overexplicit, never fails to grip us.

Pub Date: May 1, 2000

ISBN: 0-374-29987-0

Page Count: 368

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2000

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE LAKE ON FIRE
by Rosellen Brown

- BOOK REVIEW
BEFORE AND AFTER
by Rosellen Brown

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I CAPTURE THE CASTLE

by Dodie Smith ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 20, 1948

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The author of popular theatrical hits, Autumn Crocus, etc., has produced a first novel, a gentle, genteel story of English eccentrics, kindly Americans, and an artless, unworldly background that has no current feel. The story is told in diary form by Cassandra, middle child of novelist Mortmain. At the moment, the family is stale-mated—the father refusing to write, the stepmother able to pose only once in a while, Rose, beautiful and despairing of meeting anyone eligible to marry, even their friend, the librarian, can offer no solution. Rose wishes on a devil—and two Americans, Simon and Neil, appear, lost en route to the property Simon has inherited. They are fascinated by the whole unlikely thing—the old castle, the girls, the identity of Mortmain, whose one great novel Simon knew. Both girls determine that Simon shall be Rose's—and almost too late, with Rose in London shopping for her wedding, Cassandra realizes that it is Simon she loves, while Rose loves Neil. There's charm here—there's a gay, English spotting of humor that makes the romance and the slight story almost a natural for the Thirkell followers—for enthusiasts of the Jane Austen tradition. Literary Guild selection for November will give it the necessary impetus. And the crying need for clean and pleasant romance will find a measure of answer here.

Pub Date: Oct. 20, 1948

ISBN: 978-0-312-31616-7

Page Count: -

Publisher: Little, Brown

Review Posted Online: April 9, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1948

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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THE TALISMAN

by Stephen King & Peter Straub ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 1984

But, with some gripping sequences along the way and the double-whammy byline, this grandiose, meandering saga—echoing Oz,...

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The quasi-cosmic, picaresque journey of twelve-year-old Jack Sawyer—across America on foot, "flipping" in and out of a parallel universe called the "Territories"—in quest of a magical talisman that will save his widowed mother (a former B-movie star) from dying of cancer.

Jack's trek begins on the Atlantic coast, where an old black man at a seedy "Funworld" tells him about the Territories, The Talisman, and the "Twinners" (parallel-universe doppelgangers); and these first chapters recall the murky hoo-hah of Straub's opaque Shadowland—as Jack learns that his nemesis is his dead father's evil business partner Morgan Sloat, known in the Territories as "Morgan of Orris." Still, Jack plunges ahead—walking west but flipping into the Territories whenever Morgan's pursuit becomes lethal. . . and vice versa. In the real world his ordeals include: slave-labor at an upstate N.Y. tavern; harassment from pederasts; dreadful days in a neo-Diekensian "Home" for delinquent boys. In the semi-medieval Territories, he faces tree-monsters and assorted "thing" attackers—but also acquires a devoted, brave sidekick: a werewolf named Wolf, who travels with Jack into the real world. (This 150-page section, midway through, is prime alien-fiction Ã la King—funny, touching, complete with a Carrie-like outburst of retaliation from poor, sweet Wolf.) And eventually, after Wolf's noble demise, lack reaches the midwestern prep school of chum Richard Sloat (son of Morgan)—who'll reluctantly accompany him the rest of the paranoid-peril way: across the radioactive Blasted Lands on a magical train, then flipping into real-world California. . . where The Talisman awaits ("COME TO ME! COME NOW!") in a black hotel. Fans of King's horror, then, will probably be irritated by the pretentious, verbose, psycho-gothic/philosophical fantasy here—which involves coming-of-age, the Twinner gestalt, the sinful secrets of Jack's dead dad, and heavy good-vs.-evil breathing. (See King's The Stand as well as lesser Straub.) At the other extreme is a lot of King-style sentimentality and jokey vulgarity—with Jack's mind implausibly embracing four decades of pop-culture allusions.

But, with some gripping sequences along the way and the double-whammy byline, this grandiose, meandering saga—echoing Oz, Alice, and Huck Finn—is sure to reach a massive audience. . . and satisfy about half of it.