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WILDCATTING

Name: WILDCATTING
Author: Shann Nix
ISBN: 0-385-42411-6

by Shann Nix ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 12, 1993

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A feature writer for the San Francisco Chronicle debuts with a multigenerational Texas-set saga—partly realistic, partly fablelike—that centers on the energy and recklessness of Hiram, a wildcatter and larger-than-life figure. ``Texans are strange animals—huge as giants and angry as children.'' This sort of comment and others like it are delivered so flatly throughout that it's never quite clear how seriously Nix means for us to take them. Hiram is from a mythical family, and, surrounded by women, he carries on the tradition. In a landscape of alkali flats and oil rigs, he and the various branches of his family (and his wife's) are remembered by his granddaughter, who, she tell us, was 15 when he died. It's rumored that Hiram killed his mother, Lee, who ``sometimes when she looked at him...saw her own death.'' His first love is for Nakomas Sorrel, an Indian who brings an unborn child to his house. Meanwhile, the mother of his first wife, Anise, is simply known as Big Mother, and her husband as Big Joe. The story heats up and begins to take on some force and logic of its own when Hiram, sick, is nursed back to health by Big Mother; Anise returns from a year in New York City, where she'd gone to ``learn the things that writers needed to know.'' Hiram begins to wildcat for oil, and the rest of the narrative works out the complicated soap-opera details—Big Mother's death in 1976; Anise's cancer; Hiram's marriage to Francine, a preacher's widow; a financial struggle between Hiram and Drake (who married daughter Amelia), etc. Hiram lives long enough, at last, to appear on horseback in Ronald Reagan's inaugural parade. Dallas meets Twin Peaks. Nix overreaches, but, still, this is an ambitious entertainment for popular-fiction fans.

Pub Date: April 12, 1993

ISBN: 0-385-42411-6

Page Count: 448

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1993

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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DISTANT SHORES

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 2002

Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...

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Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.

After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?

Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).

Pub Date: July 1, 2002

ISBN: 0-345-45071-X

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Ballantine

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002

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.