Power's potent debut is less a novel than a multilayered portrait of a North Dakota Sioux community. Interlocking stories mostly recede chronologically and bring to life not just individual characters but also their links to one another in the past and the present. In 1977 Jeanette McVay is shown teaching eighth-grade social studies to her Native American students. In a later section, her 1961 arrival is depicted through the eyes of the powerful Anna Thunder, who sprinkles reservation dirt in Jeanette's shoes, making it impossible for the well-meaning graduate student to leave. Anna figures in many of these stories. When her daughter Crystal becomes pregnant by a Swedish-American named Martin Lundstrom and marries him, Anna steals their daughter at birth, and Crystal tells Martin that the baby is dead. After her ghost is mentioned, a woman named Red Dress arrives to explain what happened to her in 1864 that keeps her from resting peacefully, and later she visits Crystal Thunder's daughter Charlene after Charlene uses her grandmother's ``bad medicine'' to attract men and reaps terrible results. Red Dress also describes the 19th-century attempts of Father La Frambois to convert reservation dwellers. After she translates the priest's bible stories for her father he asks, ``Why are his people so determined to kill their relatives?'' This too reverberates later, when some Indian characters are shown attending parochial school. Despite the fact that many of these stories deal in the supernatural and that they intersect almost constantly, there is never a feeling that Power is forcing her hand, and although the nonchronological arrangement takes away some clarity, in return it graces the book with numerous small and large surprises and moments of recognition. Startling and complex, but always in the most natural way. (First serial to the Paris Review, VLS, and the Atlantic Monthly; Book-of-the-Month Club/Quality Paperback Book Club selections; author tour)
Pub Date: Aug. 3, 1994
ISBN: 0-399-13911-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
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
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
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