A strong debut from a writer who can whittle experiences to the quick.
An interrelated series of close-hewn, stark, and sensitive first-person tales set in Reading, Pennsylvania, New York City, and the West.
In two parts of five and six segments, respectively, Wilson Hues, a restless young man without a fixed residence, companion, or life’s purpose, grapples with ordinary but potentially perilous hurdles on his journey into manhood: the breakup of his early conflicted marriage, the death by burning accident of his abusive father, the later death of a girlfriend from cancer. Each “story” is prefaced by a short, painful, and unlovely reference to Wilson’s childhood or youth, such as “The night my father moved away he fought his oldest son,” or “My friend Travis’s parents had been stabbed.” These straightforward short pieces, titled and sometimes only a paragraph long, create an accumulative gravitas that sets the tone for the longer tales and alerts the reader to Wilson’s state of emotional susceptibility. In “Roaches,” the first and most powerful story, Wilson and his wife Melody, a rape counselor, watch their marriage disintegrate while there’s also an invasion of roaches into their Manhattan apartment. A woman whom Wilson has invited up to the infested apartment hints at the horror she witnesses there—and at the narrator’s morbid creepiness. Indeed, as Wilson, in the later “Beauty Queen,” describes his early college courtship of Melody, it isn’t entirely clear whether he has helped redeem her or has caused her eventual self-mutilation. Wilson himself confirms our suspicions of his shaky ambivalence in the chilling eponymous tale, in which he and girlfriend Alethea, her cancer in remission, prowl around their Reading home at night after hearing noises: “I realized that she understood me to be what she had been fearing.”
A strong debut from a writer who can whittle experiences to the quick.Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2002
ISBN: 0-06-621294-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2001
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
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
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