Unquiet indeed.
McCrumb’s (Prayers the Devil Answers, 2016, etc.) latest combines an Appalachian ghost story with a turn-of-the-last-century murder case.
This tale takes a while to develop, as it progresses at the ambling pace of a one-horse buggy over muddy roads. The setting veers back and forth between rural Greenbrier County in 1890s West Virginia and a segregated asylum “for the Colored Insane” in 1930. In Greenbrier, Mrs. Heaster, a farm wife, worries about her only daughter, the beautiful and impractical Zona, who, at 20, has endangered her marriageability with an out-of-wedlock pregnancy. However, after Zona’s child is adopted out, she meets handsome blacksmith “Trout” Shue. The infatuation is immediate and mutual, and the couple rushes to marry. Zona ignores her mother’s cautions about hasty marriage, particularly to someone whose last wife (Shue’s second) died of a fall less than a year before. At the wedding reception, Shue’s remark about Zona’s weight immediately alerts Mrs. Heaster that her daughter has just married what we would today term a potentially abusive control freak. Sure enough, within a few months, Zona is dead—from a tumble down the stairs, according to her husband—and Shue refuses to let anyone else near her body until it is safely interred. Mrs. Heaster’s suspicions that the death was no accident are confirmed after visits from Zona’s ghost lead her to demand an exhumation and autopsy. In 1930, James Gardner, an elderly retired attorney committed to the Lakin hospital following a suicide attempt, recalls the days when, while apprenticed to the colorful barrister William Rucker, he was second chair in the defense of Shue at his murder trial. Despite the intriguing questions touching on Gardner’s struggles as a black lawyer in the South, the asylum sections, consisting of many courtly dialogues with a sympathetic doctor, are unavoidably dull, since they distract from the far more suspenseful experiences of Mrs. Heaster as she pulls out all the stops to get justice for her daughter in a system controlled by men.
Unquiet indeed.Pub Date: June 20, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5011-7287-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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