A mobster confronts a family secret when his father passes away and leaves him in charge.
Nealon’s debut combines the politics and intrigue of a mob story with the ghostly touches of a supernatural horror tale. As heir to the family legacy, Vincenzo Attanasio inherits a unique problem when his father, the don, passes away: managing the three nonhuman entities bound to his family. The spirit Santo Seneschal has been with the family for generations, serving as assistant and confidant. Bereu, as Aspirate, helps out the family in more shadowy ways. Chiara, a creation of Bereu, is an immortal woman capable of taking whatever form is desired by the family member she serves. Though the three have served the Attanasios for generations, they don’t feel the same about their situation. While Santo Seneschal considers the family his duty and seems honored to serve, Chiara simply wants her freedom, and Bereu wants to destroy the family that kept him enslaved for so long. Unfortunately, as the Attanasio bloodline goes on, Bereu’s connection to them grows weaker and weaker until finally, with the don’s death, he is freed from bondage. Vincenzo and his children, now in terrible danger from a source they had always trusted, must learn Bereu’s plan and figure out how to stop him before the bodies start piling up. The premise is interesting, and the take on the typical mob story refreshing. It’s interesting, too, how the mob mentality comes across in the family’s relationships with their supernatural servants: Themes of duty and loyalty, as well as justice, are explored well via the conflict between Santo Seneschal and Bereu. The writing could use some revision, though, as when Chiara is first introduced: “Like Bereu Chiara wasn’t human. She wasn’t an ordinary mortal. She hadn’t been born and blessed with life that way.” At a more reasonable length and with some tightening of these repetitive, overexplanatory passages, the story could be sharper and more incisive. Additionally, Santo Senschal and Bereu need to have their back stories further explored; in this book, the present is everything.
An intriguing take on a ghostly mob story.
Pub Date: Feb. 23, 2014
ISBN: 978-1495949777
Page Count: 566
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: July 24, 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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