LAY THAT TRUMPET IN OUR HANDS

Name: LAY THAT TRUMPET IN OUR HANDS
Author: Susan Carol McCarthy
ISBN: 0-553-80169-4

by Susan Carol McCarthy ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 29, 2002

A strong debut though also flawed, most notably by inconsistency in voice. Usually, Reesa has the true perspective of a...

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Real-life events of the burgeoning civil-rights movement of 1951 are blended with one white girl’s struggle to understand the murder of her black friend.

The South doesn’t get any deeper than Central Florida in 1951, especially for the McMahon family, northerners who came to Florida for the citrus business and have found a community both of cruel traditions and hope. Thirteen-year-old Reesa’s narrative begins with the brutal murder of her friend Marvin Cully. A surrogate big brother and employee of the McMahon’s, young Marvin is beaten to death by the Klan, who mistake him for someone else. Unfortunately, small-town Mayflower and the surrounding burgs are indeed Klan country, members coming from both law enforcement and the area’s most powerful families. The death of one black boy means nothing. Even the local FBI are in the pockets of, or at least sympathetic to, the Klan. The loss of innocence for Reesa (months tick by as Marvin’s murder goes unsolved) is played against the early struggles of Civil Rights as Thurgood Marshall visits the McMahons to investigate Marvin’s death. Reesa’s family becomes ever more involved as the Klan becomes more violent—the historically real bombings of black neighborhoods, synagogues, and Catholic churches in Miami that year are tied to McCarthy's characters, both fictional and real. When Reesa's little brother Ren is grazed by a Klan bullet, the McMahon family, with the help of Marvin’s parents, hatch a plan with the FBI to bring down the local Klan.

A strong debut though also flawed, most notably by inconsistency in voice. Usually, Reesa has the true perspective of a child; at other times McCarthy gives her an older, overly intellectual understanding of events—testament to the challenge of telling an intricate tale through the eyes of one unable to grasp all of life’s complexities.

Pub Date: Jan. 29, 2002

ISBN: 0-553-80169-4

Page Count: 228

Publisher: Bantam

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2001

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
A PLACE WE KNEW WELL
by Susan Carol McCarthy

- BOOK REVIEW
TRUE FIRES
by Susan Carol McCarthy

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ANIMAL FARM

A FAIRY STORY

by George Orwell ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 26, 1946

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A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.

Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946

ISBN: 0452277507

Page Count: 114

Publisher: Harcourt, Brace

Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
GEORGE ORWELL
by George Orwell ; edited by Peter Davison

- BOOK REVIEW
DIARIES
by George Orwell & edited by Peter Davison

- BOOK REVIEW
ALL ART IS PROPAGANDA
by George Orwell

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.