A moving social saga of compassion and connection.
An unlikely friendship forms between a married couple and a disabled veteran in this debut novel.
George and Alexia Demas are middle-aged idealists living in Chicago’s Wicker Park. George is a liberal-minded curmudgeon whose belief in the dignity of the common man makes him willing to go head-to-head with the system, while Alexia’s do-gooder ethos is rooted in her Greek Orthodox faith: “For I was homeless and you gave Me shelter.” They are asked to prove their generosity when Jesus “Gato” Cárdenas, a homeless Cuban émigré and Vietnam vet, enters their lives in need of help. Gato’s Supplemental Security Income has been suspended due to the misconception that Jesus Cárdenas is dead, forcing him out on the street. The Demases agree to become Gato’s payees—to receive his SSI checks on his behalf—and to house him temporarily, despite their reservations. An odd sense of family develops between Gato and the Demases, whom the vet refers to as “Dadi” and “Mami” despite the fact that they are younger than he is. But there are more secrets to the alcoholic, gangland-fluent Gato than meet the eye, and as the Demases become further enmeshed in the life of their new ward, they learn that the misconception surrounding Jesus’ death may not be entirely false. Cole writes in a conversational prose that morphs as the narration alternates among the three protagonists. The chapters read like memoirs: “Our real fear was losing our privacy,” recalls George, “losing our ability to relax in our own home, losing the relative sanity of our lives to the craziness of his.” The plot treks ambitiously into territory rarely covered in fiction, exploring the liminal space between assisted living and homelessness that so many disabled people occupy. The novel successfully evokes the frustrations and rewards that come with trying to help a stranger in a way that is both affecting and educational. Gato’s dialect-heavy narration can induce winces at times, and there is a light Christian undertone to the story that may put off some readers. Even so, Cole digs deep into his subjects to craft a satisfying modern morality tale.
A moving social saga of compassion and connection.Pub Date: May 24, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-63505-056-1
Page Count: 312
Publisher: North Loop Books
Review Posted Online: July 31, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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