HOUSE OF WONDER

Name: HOUSE OF WONDER
Author: Sarah Healy
ISBN: 978-0-451-23987-7

by Sarah Healy ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 2, 2014

Shifting admirably between the hidden past and the uncomfortably exposed present, Healy creates a believable and poignant...

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In Healy's second novel (Can I Get An Amen?, 2012), divorced single mother Jenna returns home to New Jersey to help her aging mother, Silla, cope with accusations that Jenna's autistic brother, Warren, is responsible for a string of burglaries in the neighborhood.

The word "wonder" is defined as "rapt attention or astonishment at something awesomely mysterious," which is a concise way of describing how Jenna, single mother to daughter Rose, has always conceived of her undiagnosed, but likely autistic, twin brother, Warren. For 36 years, Warren has barely held down a series of entry-level jobs when he's not in his room in his hoarder mother's home making model airplanes. A recent spate of petty thefts has made the formerly tolerant neighbors suspicious of Warren and openly hostile to his mother. Jenna, who's running a graphic design business and trying not to think about her charming absentee ex, Duncan, finds herself drawn into the familial dynamics she once sought to escape. However, as she delves into her mother's secret past, Jenna begins to find the seeds of a new life potentially blooming with a former high school crush. But can Warren be trusted, or will he need to be institutionalized? Creating a rich family mythology, including earlobe pulling in times of distress to summon a family member and fabricated monsters named "Maglons," Healy also occasionally writes in gorgeous metaphor: "I had stood on the front steps of our apartment as [Duncan] got in a cab for the airport, wishing that I could cross and cross and cross my arms over my chest, wishing that I had rows and layers of arms, like the horseshoe crabs my father used to pull out of the water at the beach." The family-specific language and nuanced emotional turns make the novel feel instantly familiar without being predictable.

Shifting admirably between the hidden past and the uncomfortably exposed present, Healy creates a believable and poignant portrait of a unique family grappling to understand itself and its role in a largely unimaginative world.

Pub Date: Sept. 2, 2014

ISBN: 978-0-451-23987-7

Page Count: 352

Publisher: New American Library

Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

by Harper Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 1960

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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

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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LONESOME DOVE

A NOVEL (SIMON & SCHUSTER CLASSICS)

by Larry McMurtry ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 1985

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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.