A fast-paced if uneven depiction of racial injustice in the segregated South.
After a 16-year-old black girl is convicted of killing her employer in 1912 Virginia, a young white journalist becomes embroiled in the aftermath.
Howell uses the real-life story of Virginia Christian as the basis for his debut novel, which is told from the perspective of Charlie Mears, the reporter assigned to cover her story. After a white woman, Ida Belote, is found beaten and dead, an all-white jury quickly finds her “washwoman,” Virgie, guilty of the murder, despite serious ambiguity about what transpired. It’s clear from the start that Virgie doesn’t understand the direness of her situation. “Daddy gone come, fetch me out of here?” she asks Charlie the first time he goes to the jail to interview her. “It’s best not to talk,” he warns her. “Not to anybody but your lawyer.” The “white savior” who swoops in to rescue people of color is a trope well past its expiration date, and readers may feel that Charlie’s seemingly inherent goodness (what reporter would tell an interviewee not to talk?) edges the narrative a bit too much in that direction. But it’s Charlie’s inability to effect change, not any heroic action, which drives the story. Indeed, the novel works best after the trial has ended, when Charlie is forced to decide how to make his way forward as a civil rights–minded writer. At times Howell gets bogged down in historical detail, and Charlie’s burgeoning romance with one of Ida Belote’s daughters plays out predictably. Regardless, Howell knows how to hold readers’ attention, and Christian’s story is an important reminder of the horrors of Jim Crow: she was the only female juvenile ever executed in Virginia, dying in the electric chair a day after her 17th birthday.
A fast-paced if uneven depiction of racial injustice in the segregated South.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-58838-317-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: NewSouth
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2015
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
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