Sincere and captivating, a revelatory look at the freeing properties of forgiveness and acceptance.
An art historian tries to make sense of her family’s secrets while caring for an ailing parent in Turner’s debut novella set in the late 1990s.
Katie has one goal in mind when she returns home to upstate New York: secure care—in-home or otherwise—for her 82-year-old father. In the two years since his wife died, retired attorney Edward Broadbent has been “shrinking” away, rapidly losing weight and his vision as he battles a congestive heart condition and macular degeneration. Katie initially plans a quick visit, but nagging issues from the past and a desire to finally connect lead to an extended stay. There “are some things I need to know before my father dies,” Katie tells her husband, Henry, who remains in Los Angeles with their two children. Over the course of her visit, she attempts to coax more information from her father about his Iowa upbringing (“I look at Dad, thinking for the umpteenth time how little I know of his boyhood. Born in Fort Dodge, a small city I’ve never been to”). And she tries to discuss her mother’s debilitating mental illness—a topic seldom examined, or even acknowledged, in their previous talks. As the roles of parent and child begin to blur, Katie must answer some tough questions while struggling to determine what her father really needs in his final years. Using events from the family’s past and present, Turner explores the complexity of familial bonds in this highly relatable work of literary fiction. Early in this satisfying book, she notes: “Someone, Proust I think, said that we only truly see someone we love after an absence, and then only if we see them first before they see us.” Turner’s protagonist experiences similar clarity. When Edward greets his daughter at the airport, the once-powerful lawyer uses a cane and wears a smile of “frozen amicability”—a conversational countermeasure he’s adopted now that his poor eyesight prevents him from reading facial cues. The shift in power frightens Katie and removes both characters from their established roles. Yet as both gain footing in this new reality, there are also moments of unexpected joy.
Sincere and captivating, a revelatory look at the freeing properties of forgiveness and acceptance.Pub Date: Oct. 12, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-692-52010-9
Page Count: 138
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Anyone who believes in true love or is simply willing to accept it as the premise of a winding tale will find this debut an...
True love flares between two people, but they find that circumstances always impede it.
On a winter day in London, Laurie spots Jack from her bus home and he sparks a feeling in her so deep that she spends the next year searching for him. Her roommate and best friend, Sarah, is the perfect wing-woman but ultimately—and unknowingly—ends the search by finding Jack and falling for him herself. Laurie’s hasty decision not to tell Sarah is the second painful missed opportunity (after not getting off the bus), but Sarah’s happiness is so important to Laurie that she dedicates ample energy into retraining her heart not to love Jack. Laurie is misguided, but her effort and loyalty spring from a true heart, and she considers her project mostly successful. Perhaps she would have total success, but the fact of the matter is that Jack feels the same deep connection to Laurie. His reasons for not acting on them are less admirable: He likes Sarah and she’s the total package; why would he give that up just because every time he and Laurie have enough time together (and just enough alcohol) they nearly fall into each other’s arms? Laurie finally begins to move on, creating a mostly satisfying life for herself, whereas Jack’s inability to be genuine tortures him and turns him into an ever bigger jerk. Patriarchy—it hurts men, too! There’s no question where the book is going, but the pacing is just right, the tone warm, and the characters sympathetic, even when making dumb decisions.
Anyone who believes in true love or is simply willing to accept it as the premise of a winding tale will find this debut an emotional, satisfying read.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-57468-2
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
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