A distinctive coming-of-age tale.
Grant (The Passion of Alice, 1995) uses the political as a counterpoint to the personal in a novel set amidst the tumult of Boston in 1974.
The desegregation of South Boston’s public schools, the rise of Black Power and a young woman’s exploration of her sexual identity are among the weighty themes explored here. A native of Southie, tough-talking teen Ann Ahern, the book’s narrator/protagonist, is schooled in the folkways of her insular Irish-American community. She knows the kids who rioted when black students arrived in Southie’s schools, and her mother has joined other Catholic matriarchs saying rosaries in protest of busing. But ever since she was caught with her tongue in the ear of another girl, Ann has been an outsider as much as an insider. At the start of her junior year, the tensions that define her existence coalesce in a single person: Mademoiselle Eugenie, the new French teacher. A Parisian of Senegalese descent, beautiful, exotic and self-possessed, she is everything Ann is not; the teen is at least as attracted to the possibility of escape that Mademoiselle Eugenie represents as to the woman herself. Ann’s infatuation will lead her out of her claustrophobic community into both love and danger. Ultimately, Eugenie will compel Ann to pick a side, and it’s to the author’s credit that she lets her young heroine make choices that are not especially noble and not necessarily appealing. Ann is both keenly aware of the culture war being waged around her and utterly indifferent to the historical import of the events she’s witnessing—she is, after all, a teenager. Her solipsism may leave readers thinking less of Ann as a person, but it’s an essential element of her engagingly idiosyncratic voice.
A distinctive coming-of-age tale.Pub Date: March 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4165-5622-0
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2007
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
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
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