Short pieces by an author who wields unease like a tool; a lean volume full of hearty character details and mid-20s yearning.
Three connected stories about an ingénue who travels across continents and oceans in the 1960s.
Scofield (Occasions of Sin, 2004, etc.) offers three pieces about solo travel as a woman flirts with danger while trying to prove a theory about female autonomy. In each story—“Oh Baby Oh,” a hitchhiking tale; “An Easy Pass,” about a stay at a bullfighter’s ranch; and the title story, set on the island of Mykonos with two soldiers—Baby attempts to use her sexuality to curry favor. But she doesn’t yet understand men, herself, or how this might work. Baby—as she lets the men call her—carries The Stranger and misguided regret. “She does not yet think of herself and her peers as men and women,” nor has she formed skills to stay in one place and deal with conflict. First she hitchhikes west, toward the dream of a soldier she met as a teen, an idea she admits to herself “is so ridiculous, and so certain” that she is willing to risk her safety. Next, on the bullfighter’s ranch, she sees men practice the art of power play with bulls and women. To the matadors, the games have consequences. “Why, then,” she writes, “would I want to practice passes, except to go into the ring….” Each encounter between man and woman, animal and man, is fraught with the tension of seductive control. Finally, Scofield flips the power dynamic on Mykonos. But Baby’s self-harming betrays her outward confidence. She tries her hardest to communicate her theory about female independence, arguing, “I want my own damned reasons to be who I am….I want my own schedule for it.” Her happiness depends on her ability to adapt.
Short pieces by an author who wields unease like a tool; a lean volume full of hearty character details and mid-20s yearning.Pub Date: May 15, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-930835-19-1
Page Count: 132
Publisher: Wellstone Press
Review Posted Online: March 8, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2017
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these...
Figuratively and literally shattering moments of hoRRRRRipilication in Chamberlain, Maine where stones fly from the sky rather than from the hands of the villagers (as they did in "The Lottery," although the latter are equal to other forms of persecution).
All beginning when Carrie White discovers a gift with telekinetic powers (later established as a genetic fact), after she menstruates in full ignorance of the process and thinks she is bleeding to death while the other monsters in the high school locker room bait and bully her mercilessly. Carrie is the only child of a fundamentalist freak mother who has brought her up with a concept of sin which no blood of the Lamb can wash clean. In addition to a sympathetic principal and gym teacher, there's one girl who wishes to atone and turns her date for the spring ball over to Carrie who for the first time is happy, beautiful and acknowledged as such. But there will be hell to pay for this success—not only her mother but two youngsters who douse her in buckets of fresh-killed pig blood so that Carrie once again uses her "wild talent," flexes her mind and a complete catastrophe (explosion and an uncontrolled fire) virtually destroys the town.
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these youngsters who once ate peanut butter now scrawl "Carrie White eats shit." But as they still say around here, "Sit a spell and collect yourself."Pub Date: April 8, 1974
ISBN: 0385086954
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1974
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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