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TEMPLE SECRETS

Name: TEMPLE SECRETS
Author: Susan Gabriel
ISBN: 978-0983588276

by Susan Gabriel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 16, 2015

Savannah’s atmosphere, culture, and history flavor this often-engaging tale of intertwined families.

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The secrets and lies of Savannah, Georgia’s upper crust come to light in Gabriel’s (Circle of the Ancestors, 2014, etc.) Southern Gothic novel.

For decades, Iris Temple has manipulated those around her by using her own wealth, position, illness, and idiosyncrasies. More importantly, she also has a ledger begun by her great-grandfather, containing secrets about Savannah’s rich and powerful, which is safely locked up at the bank. Queenie, Iris’ companion for 35 years, is also her half sister; it’s an uneasy relationship, given Queenie’s family’s long history with the Temples—first as slaves, and then as servants. Iris’ iron grip on those around her is threatened when a classified ad appears in the newspaper: “FOUND. One Book of Temple Secrets. First Secret to be revealed tomorrow.” As the secrets begin to come out (such as, “Several Savannah patriarchs have mix-raced [sic] children”), the town erupts in anger. Further disclosures unearth long-buried truths and stir up the Temple mansion’s many ghosts, leading to a final, cleansing confrontation. Gabriel unfolds her story deftly, with well-paced revelations about the complicated relationships between the mansion’s white and black inhabitants. Queenie’s 100-year-old mother, Old Sally, who still practices “Gullah magic,” is an intriguing counterpart to Iris: both are powerful matriarchs in their own way, though Old Sally possesses a contentment and benevolence that Iris doesn’t. Gabriel also evokes the Spanish moss–covered atmosphere of ghost-filled Savannah, and the Temple mansion in particular, with satisfying spookiness. Iris, however, is a heavy-handed caricature—a snobby, querulous, ever-flatulent joke that isn’t very funny. Also, although the novel strives to rebalance the inequities of history, it offers a different set of stereotypes, instead: Old Sally, for example, is a magical, sainted minority who has a special connection to the unseen, while white people are always uptight at funerals. Still, the final chapters hold a few surprises that add some dimension. The author’s thoughtfulness about masters and slaves, employers and servants, and family relations also contributes to a satisfying read.

Savannah’s atmosphere, culture, and history flavor this often-engaging tale of intertwined families.

Pub Date: Feb. 16, 2015

ISBN: 978-0983588276

Page Count: 338

Publisher: Wild Lily Arts

Review Posted Online: April 13, 2015

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

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.

Pub Date: July 11, 1960

ISBN: 0060935464

Page Count: 323

Publisher: Lippincott

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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LONESOME DOVE

A NOVEL (SIMON & SCHUSTER CLASSICS)

by Larry McMurtry ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 1985

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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.