A slender tale of surviving without men that haphazardly stitches together the fabric of some women’s lives.
From Dallas (The Persian Pickle Club, 1995, etc.), a transparently homespun tale of pioneering women facing tough challenges when their men go off to fight for the Union.
The story, which awkwardly mixes period settings with contemporary politics, is told in the form of letters from Alice Bullock to married sister Lizzie in Illinois. Alice, a recent bride now living on a small farm in Iowa, begins the correspondence as husband Charlie is about to go to fight Johnny Reb. She is also a quilter who delights in piecing fabric together and making squares: each chapter is framed with a commentary on quilting, which adds to the folksiness, but, since quilts by now have become feminist icons, they also add a discordant contemporary note. Alice, who has just fallen pregnant, is left to help taciturn and critical Mother Bullock run the farm. Alice soon miscarries but is somewhat cheered by getting together with neighboring women to make quilts for the soldiers. Life gets tougher, though, as the war continues: Charlie is taken prisoner, money is tight, and Alice is pursued by a malevolent Southern sympathizer, Samuel Smead, who tries to rape her. But Mother Bullock warms up to Alice and defends her when she’s accused of murdering the unpleasant Smead, whose decaying body is found near their farmhouse. Alice also describes her relations with the local women (whose friendships are not always dependable); Mother Bullock’s terminal breast cancer; and the difficulty of farming without a man’s help. Her advice to Lizzie, though, who has problems with her husband, and her observations on sex and birth control, often sound more like the stuff of the 21st century, as opposed to the 19th. The war eventually ends, as do the letters, and Alice, weary but proud, is ready for a new future and new quilting experiences.
A slender tale of surviving without men that haphazardly stitches together the fabric of some women’s lives.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-312-20359-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2000
A kind of Holden Caulfield who speaks bravely and winningly from inside the sorrows of autism: wonderful, simple, easy,...
Britisher Haddon debuts in the adult novel with the bittersweet tale of a 15-year-old autistic who’s also a math genius.
Christopher Boone has had some bad knocks: his mother has died (well, she went to the hospital and never came back), and soon after he found a neighbor’s dog on the front lawn, slain by a garden fork stuck through it. A teacher said that he should write something that he “would like to read himself”—and so he embarks on this book, a murder mystery that will reveal who killed Mrs. Shears’s dog. First off, though, is a night in jail for hitting the policeman who questions him about the dog (the cop made the mistake of grabbing the boy by the arm when he can’t stand to be touched—any more than he can stand the colors yellow or brown, or not knowing what’s going to happen next). Christopher’s father bails him out but forbids his doing any more “detecting” about the dog-murder. When Christopher disobeys (and writes about it in his book), a fight ensues and his father confiscates the book. In time, detective-Christopher finds it, along with certain other clues that reveal a very great deal indeed about his mother’s “death,” his father’s own part in it—and the murder of the dog. Calming himself by doing roots, cubes, prime numbers, and math problems in his head, Christopher runs away, braves a train-ride to London, and finds—his mother. How can this be? Read and see. Neither parent, if truth be told, is the least bit prepossessing or more than a cutout. Christopher, though, with pet rat Toby in his pocket and advanced “maths” in his head, is another matter indeed, and readers will cheer when, way precociously, he takes his A-level maths and does brilliantly.
A kind of Holden Caulfield who speaks bravely and winningly from inside the sorrows of autism: wonderful, simple, easy, moving, and likely to be a smash.Pub Date: June 17, 2003
ISBN: 0-385-50945-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2003
Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
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