The best examination of political and moral issues within the framework of family life since Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres...
The author of the odd, haunting What Happened to Henry (2004) does even better in her powerful second novel about the inescapable consequences of war and lies.
Narrator Iris Sunnaret initially depicts her childhood with adoptive parents Eleanor and Charlie Jackson as secure and idyllic, complete with patriotic Fourth of July barbecues. But then her brothers go to serve in Vietnam in 1968, and word comes that Eddie is dead and Perry is missing. Older sister Angie, enraged that Charlie and Eleanor allowed the boys to enlist, starts an affair with their son Hank (raised as a brother to the four Sunnarets) and gets involved with radical groups protesting the war—anathema to Charlie, who served with the Sunnarets’ father in the early days of the Indochinese conflict and has always run his household along strict, military-influenced lines of order. “Everybody had his place,” remembers Hank in one of the novel’s most chilling scenes, explaining why Iris’s father had killed the children’s dog while home on one of his infrequent visits from the Far East. Girls rank above dogs but below boys and men; where grown women fit in is unclear, but the gradually emerging facts about the death of Iris’s mother suggest that being the wife of a warrior was intolerable for her. Angie had protected baby Iris from their mother’s increasing mental instability, and as her illusions about the past drop away, Iris struggles to reconcile the embittered adult sister who frightens her with the aunt and uncle whose complicity with evil she now recognizes but whose love she cannot reject. There are no easy answers in Pywell’s rich narrative, which seems to offer Shakespearean serenity in the final scene (another Fourth of July party), then slaps readers in the face with a brutal reminder of the cost at which this serenity was achieved.
The best examination of political and moral issues within the framework of family life since Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres (1991). Pywell has a gift for capturing the complexity of sibling relationships that is all her own.Pub Date: April 20, 2006
ISBN: 0-399-15350-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
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
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