Rape, murder, abuse, incest, self-mutilation, and temporary insanity combine to form an uninspiring first novel. Growing up in an unspecified region of rural America, Jael hates her Mammie, who allows the men who buy her moonshine to force themselves on the girl with only the warning ``Don't take no more than you pay for.'' Jael eventually knocks Mammie over the head with a mallet, and the murder is blamed on a disgruntled customer. She is adopted by the deacon, River Bill, and lives contentedly in his house in the middle of the river until the day she predictably becomes ``his wife instead of his daughter...it confused me like nothing before.'' She takes off with a handsome young man who stops at their shop while River Bill isn't around, only to find when she awakens that he's disappeared with all her belongings—a development that surprises her far more than it will the reader. Jael spears frogs for dinner, makes a home under a giant oak, and begins a strange ritual: cutting herself on the stomach, hips, and insides of her thighs. The tone here is so matter-of-fact, and Jael's voice is so colorless, that even this extreme experience seems dull, lifeless, and predictable. After her rescue, Jael fakes amnesia so she won't have to go back to her former life and begin the difficult process of resocializing; instead, she finds support and strength in imaginary companions like the woman she models out of wax and the Virgin Mary. Reynolds's lackluster prose never leaves any doubt that Jael will overcome this passing madness, leaving little reason to watch her working as a janitor in a church, falling in love with a young artist, and joining a sexual- abuse survivors' group. The subject of abuse and recovery deserves more skilled treatment than it gets here. (Literary Guild alternate selection)
Pub Date: Jan. 4, 1995
ISBN: 0-399-13994-X
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1994
More of the same: Sparks has his recipe, and not a bit of it is missing here. It’s the literary equivalent of high fructose...
Sparks (The Longest Ride, 2013, etc.) serves up another heaping helping of sentimental Southern bodice-rippage.
Gone are the blondes of yore, but otherwise the Sparks-ian formula is the same: a decent fellow from a good family who’s gone through some rough patches falls in love with a decent girl from a good family who’s gone through some rough patches—and is still suffering the consequences. The guy is innately intelligent but too quick to throw a punch, the girl beautiful and scary smart. If you hold a fatalistic worldview, then you’ll know that a love between them can end only in tears. If you hold a Sparks-ian one, then true love will prevail, though not without a fight. Voilà: plug in the character names, and off the story goes. In this case, Colin Hancock is the misunderstood lad who’s decided to reform his hard-knuckle ways but just can’t keep himself from connecting fist to face from time to time. Maria Sanchez is the dedicated lawyer in harm’s way—and not just because her boss is a masher. Simple enough. All Colin has to do is punch the partner’s lights out: “The sexual harassment was bad enough, but Ken was a bully as well, and Colin knew from his own experience that people like that didn’t stop abusing their power unless someone made them. Or put the fear of God into them.” No? No, because bound up in Maria’s story, wrinkled with the doings of an equally comely sister, there’s a stalker and a closet full of skeletons. Add Colin’s back story, and there’s a perfect couple in need of constant therapy, as well as a menacing cop. Get Colin and Maria to smooching, and the plot thickens as the storylines entangle. Forget about love—can they survive the evil that awaits them out in the kudzu-choked woods?
More of the same: Sparks has his recipe, and not a bit of it is missing here. It’s the literary equivalent of high fructose corn syrup, stickily sweet but irresistible.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4555-2061-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
The previous books of this author (Devil of a State, 1962; The Right to an Answer, 1961) had valid points of satire, some humor, and a contemporary view, but here the picture is all out—from a time in the future to an argot that makes such demands on the reader that no one could care less after the first two pages.
If anyone geta beyond that—this is the first person story of Alex, a teen-age hoodlum, who, in step with his times, viddies himself and the world around him without a care for law, decency, honesty; whose autobiographical language has droogies to follow his orders, wallow in his hate and murder moods, accents the vonof human hole products. Betrayed by his dictatorial demands by a policing of his violence, he is committed when an old lady dies after an attack; he kills again in prison; he submits to a new method that will destroy his criminal impulses; blameless, he is returned to a world that visits immediate retribution on him; he is, when an accidental propulsion to death does not destroy him, foisted upon society once more in his original state of sin.
What happens to Alex is terrible but it is worse for the reader.
Pub Date: Jan. 8, 1962
ISBN: 0393928098
Page Count: 357
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1962
SEEN & HEARD
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