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THE RAT TREE

Name: THE RAT TREE
Author: Susan M. Carr
ISBN: 978-1-985577-82-4

by Susan M. Carr illustrated by Lauren Iida ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 18, 2018

Emotional complications add a fresh note to an abuse theme that’s seen heavy use in recent decades.

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In this novella set in 1950s Oregon, a girl and her cousins put on a play to catch the conscience of their abusive grandfather.

In summertime, a large family comes together for regular visits at Grandma and Grandpa Scheibert’s Oregon place, which features homemade cookies, a swimming pool, and an old two-story woolen mill full of interesting things. But to reach the mill, visitors first have to pass the rat tree. This summer, the narrator—a girl in early pubescence—is coming to some realizations, most importantly about Grandpa. His smile is “devious, disturbing”; he leers at women, including his daughters; and when the grandkids pile on for a hug, he pushes his fingers inside the narrator’s “private area.” When she begins shouting “Run from Grandpa!,” her own mother admonishes her, suggesting a deep-rooted family sickness. Nevertheless, the narrator instructs her sisters to yell “RUN FROM GRANDPA” as loud as possible if he should ever touch them inappropriately. With her sympathetic cousin Carl, the narrator explores their grandfather’s trunks in the mill’s attic, uncovering in old letters references to the Fatherland and a mother who was cruel to him. Carl and the narrator vow to protect their younger cousins, making them pledge to run if Grandpa tries anything. With her cousins, the narrator puts on a play based on Grandpa’s papers that’s designed to expose his childhood hurts—with explosive and distressing results beyond what she’d reckoned. The doubly painful topics of Nazism and incestuous child abuse could become sensationalistic, but Carr (The Ballad of Desiree, 2016, etc.) avoids this through her narrator’s point of view, limited because of age and inexperience. The girl just wants to put a stop to Grandpa’s abuse through whatever practical means are available, but darker undercurrents flow through the story, particularly in the image of the rat. The narrator sees her methods as innocent, but the tale’s ending suggests it’s not that simple. In telling secrets, she too could be considered a rat, and she feels “sick and sorry.” The mixed-media illustrations by Iida (Rattan Woman, 2018, etc.) feature a cut-paper technique and have a vintage feel that goes well with the text.

Emotional complications add a fresh note to an abuse theme that’s seen heavy use in recent decades.

Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2018

ISBN: 978-1-985577-82-4

Page Count: 56

Publisher: CreateSpace

Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2018

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.