An appealing young heroine discovers her own strengths in this seamless mix of fantasy, suspense, and real-life dilemmas.
A sixth grade girl’s strange works of art, her interest in mysteries, and a dangerous bully embroil her in turmoil and adventure.
Part mystery, part fantasy, and part journey of self-discovery, this middle-grade novel focuses on a 12-year-old girl with an unusual gift. Gracie Cooper, who was adopted as a baby, stopped making realistic art in the first grade after her classmates’ paintings were found torn to shreds. Only Gracie’s was spared, but at home, she wondered why the ferocious wild animals she had painted now appeared to be sound asleep. Her alarmed mother cryptically made Gracie promise to draw and paint “nothing that exists in the world” from then on. Except for one secret painting, Gracie sticks to abstract art even after her mother dies. But a new art teacher’s insistence on realism gets Gracie in trouble when fresh fruit in her painting turns brown and she is accused of deliberately altering her work. The news that her best friend and fellow mystery buff is moving away adds to Gracie’s woes, as does the class bully. He taunts one girl for speaking Spanish instead of English (the characters are not otherwise identified by race or ethnicity) and targets Gracie with verbal and physical abuse. Then Gracie finds one of her creations very much alive in her mother’s sketchbook. As Gracie and her creation interact, the novel deftly draws readers into a fantastical journey through the world of the heroine’s vivid imagination, culminating in her determination to overcome fear and self-doubt in a life that will never be ordinary again. Throughout this well-crafted tale, Ralph (The Peculiar Circumstances Surrounding the Disappearance of the Extraordinary Jimmy Pickles, 2015, etc.), a former teacher and the author of fiction for children and young adults, offers imaginative twists and emotional resonance. He shapes Gracie’s still-grieving father and other adults and her relationship with her peers with informed empathy. And the author’s revelation of the origin of Gracie and her talent is a genuinely moving surprise.
An appealing young heroine discovers her own strengths in this seamless mix of fantasy, suspense, and real-life dilemmas.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-07-900056-6
Page Count: 292
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Sept. 4, 2019
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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