A beautifully written and psychologically intelligent thriller.
In this novel, a mother desperately tries to find her abducted child—while receiving telepathic messages.
Claire Shore’s 6-year-old daughter, Molly, has been tormented by the same nightmare for weeks, accompanied by stomachaches, apparently the result of stress. Claire worries that this is something more than a fleeting bout of youthful anxiety, and her own mother recommends she seek the help of a professional therapist. Claire takes Molly shopping for a new outfit to wear to a friend’s birthday party and then suddenly realizes Molly’s vanished and is overcome by a wave of panic. Unable to find her, she calls her husband, Artie, and the police, and a frantic search begins. Claire remembers that an unfamiliar woman brashly intruded into her conversation with Molly, and she turns out to be a prostitute from Texas and the prime suspect. Meanwhile, Molly is whisked away by her captors, renamed Daisy, brutally beaten and mistreated, the victim of an organized kidnapping racket. Claire believes her daughter is sending her telepathic messages, and she reveals that her own sister, Faye, also experienced nightmares as a child that were better understood as visions. As the days and then weeks and months go by, the prospects for rescuing Molly seem increasingly bleak, and only a psychic who claims to have dreams about the child still believes she remains alive. The book shifts back and forth between two parallel stories—the desperate search for Molly spearheaded by her parents and the girl’s own fearful trials. Gale (Goddess Gilda, 2013) artfully conjures taut suspense, keeping the plot moving at a brisk pace without projecting the ultimate outcome of the tale. Some of the details of Molly’s ordeal are unsettlingly grim, but the author doesn’t pummel her readers with macabre violence, though some sections are, nonetheless, challenging to bear. Claire’s marriage begins to suffer early on, and her guilt over Molly’s disappearance is pulverizing, a subplot developed with impressive sensitivity by Gale. In prose that sometimes approaches poetic elegance, she captures the deep connection between Molly and her mother and Claire’s refusal, despite spiritual depletion, to relax the vigil for her missing child: “I climbed into bed suddenly exhausted. I crept back into the bathroom and soaked a washcloth under cold water. I rung [sic] it out, folded it in thirds, crawled back in bed and pressed the cold cloth to my forehead. I listened for my daughter.” Gale also skillfully delves into the mind of one of Molly’s captors, a morally misguided woman but not an evil one, looking, however perversely, for a family of her own. The heart of the story, though, is Molly, who memorably perseveres despite her understandable terror and the degradation she weathers. The author uses the child’s telepathy as a sign of her emotional acuteness and the basis of her deep attunement with her mother. Gale has a talent for depicting compassion that survives even the darkest trauma, and Molly’s own resilience is the finest example of that knack.
A beautifully written and psychologically intelligent thriller.Pub Date: May 25, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5449-8284-7
Page Count: 356
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: July 24, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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