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THE REUNION

Name: THE REUNION
Author: Sue Walker
ISBN: 0-06-072609-1

by Sue Walker ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 1, 2004

Cuts from character to character and one year to another make for a choppy ride.

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Middling debut thriller about a group of troubled teenagers and the dark secret that stalks them after they become adults.

What awful deed took place by the shores of Loch Fyne oh-so-many years ago? Walker, a BBC investigative journalist, will remind her readers again and again that something tragic indeed happened on that outing to the Scottish Highlands in the late 1970s. The perpetrators were a group of disturbed teenagers lodged at The Unit, a mental home near Edinburgh. In the chapters set way back when, tensions among the gang are clearly ready to combust. Danny Rintoul is a child rapist. In her manic phases, pyromaniac Lydia Young explodes, threatening to torch the place. Alex Baxendale steps boldly out of the closet and launches an affair with a woman on the staff. Innes Haldane is less troubled, more treatable, and thus, by the time she’s an adult, one of the group’s better-adjusted graduates. But whatever happened in the Highlands claims its due years later, first on Innes, then on all the others. A former member of the group leaves Innes a phone message that goes unanswered. Then the caller turns up dead. Shortly after that, another group member dies, an apparent suicide. And then someone kidnaps yet another former member’s child. The author’s ’70s and present-day plot lines circle each other like jets in a drawn-out holding pattern. Like a good flight attendant, she parses out clues to her passengers and keeps promising that something big is coming. But it’s not enough to prevent riders (or readers) from growing weary. Alternating points of view and characterizations that don’t go beyond basic psychiatric diagnoses keep empathy, and thus suspense, at bay. The ending does deliver: the awful deed was indeed awful.

Cuts from character to character and one year to another make for a choppy ride.

Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2004

ISBN: 0-06-072609-1

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2004

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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DISTANT SHORES

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 2002

Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...

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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

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

by Harper Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 1960

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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.