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
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
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
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