Tender, if a bit sugary; may strike a chord with male baby boomers.
A charming collection of vignettes detailing the antics of young Frank Wilcox and his friends as they make their way through primary and junior high school in fictional Acorn, Georgia, during the 1960s and’70s.
Vaughan’s (Brookwood Road, 2014) second novel covers the same years as his first, but whereas his earlier work told the story of Frank’s childhood on his grandfather’s hog farm, this volume focuses on his school experiences. As readers learn up front, Frank is a stand-in for Vaughan himself, and Acorn is in fact Cumming, Georgia. The quasi memoir is a portrait of midcentury small-town life at its most idyllic. The recollections are joyful, peopled with loving family, kindly teachers, helpful townsfolk, and loyal friends, especially his best bud, Charlie Keller. Frank is shy, hesitant in sports, and passionate about reading. Early on, he began writing short stories, and in seventh grade, he was urged to begin a school newspaper. Vaughan displays a similar gift for storytelling. He is articulate and engaging, able to insert an adult-looking-back chuckle here and there as he recollects the youngsters’ preoccupations and concerns. He is especially adept at portraying young Frank’s vulnerabilities—the fear of receiving a spanking at school or the terror of being vaccinated. He refused to learn how to swim until he was good and ready, seeing no reason to go into water above his head. The collection showcases good boys getting into mischief, usually getting caught, and rather gently being forgiven—with a life lesson or two learned along the way. Although the book proceeds sequentially through eight years, each chapter is a stand-alone. Occasionally this results in some repetition of background information, but it also makes it easy for readers to jump in and out of the book at will.
Tender, if a bit sugary; may strike a chord with male baby boomers.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5354-0501-0
Page Count: 348
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2017
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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