A lush, atmospheric novel that combines literary detective work, romance and international flair.
In this debut novel, a forensic librarian uncovers letters that lead to an explanation for her father’s absence.
Vela Ostofvold is in Rome at a symposium about her work as a forensic librarian, “profiling how ephemera, inscriptions, and notations create distinct book personalities.” A rather sad, mysterious man named William Dean approaches her. He tells her that he went to school with her mother, Olivia, with whom he’s lost contact, in the Canadian town where Vela was also raised while Olivia pursued her career as an opera singer. Vela, still in Rome, then goes to the antiquarian bookstore discovered during her vacations spent with her mother. She chats with friend Amelia, who now runs the shop, and wonders if Dean could be the father she has never known. Later, Vela and Amelia are packing up Olivia’s Rome flat, since the building is being sold. In a letter of instructions, the ever traveling Olivia mentions that she plans to go to Oxford, England, to visit Penelope Arthur, her childhood teacher. Vela then finds letters from Penelope, which reveal the teacher had offered to raise Vela but went to India instead. Vela travels to Oxford, where she has a consulting project, and visits Penelope, whose memory is failing. Thanks to material provided by Penelope, however, and after another conversation with Dean, Vela finally discovers a past tragedy and her father’s identity. The novel concludes with Vela’s return to Rome and a new opportunity to reignite her romance with Franco, Amelia’s cousin. First-time novelist Sikstrom brings ambitious scope to this narrative, which encompasses a compelling family mystery, a heroine whose career could be the subject of its own series, several exotic locales, and a fairy tale–like love story. While Sikstrom is mostly successful in handling all these elements, the narrative is occasionally unbalanced. For example, Vela’s current age and home base are left a bit hazy, and there’s digressive detail about Penelope’s sojourn in India. Overall, however, this is a rich and entertaining debut.
A lush, atmospheric novel that combines literary detective work, romance and international flair.Pub Date: May 30, 2014
ISBN: 978-1497398740
Page Count: 234
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Sept. 11, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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