A lyrical, compelling coming-of-age story with magical elements.
A water-loving girl struggles to find her place on land in this novel.
Growing up in Grand Haven, Michigan, by the shores of the titular lake, Elise Faulkner is shy and withdrawn, much to the chagrin of her ex–beauty queen mother. Despite the former Miss Coast Guard’s efforts to help Elise make local friends, she prefers to stay home reading or writing to one of her international pen pals, like Fabrice Nwanko, the Ghanian schoolgirl who reveals her uncle’s encounter with a mermaid. Elise is fascinated by mermaids because of her scandalous great-grandmother Margaret Stieg, a wreck diver who claimed her life was saved by one when her oxygen was cut off during an underwater mission to retrieve a sunken diamond ring. Elise’s quiet, dreamy life changes when her mother introduces her to world-traveling, cigarette-smoking Chiara. As the two girls become fast friends, bonding over vintage fashion and playing hooky at the beach, Elise discovers she’s inherited some of Margaret’s daring after all—especially after meeting Miguel Ballesteros, a Roma carnival worker and flamenco guitarist who tells her, “I’m your destiny.” Will their romance lure her away from the lake—and the people—she loves? And will the darkness of Miguel’s future sweep Elise under with it? While Elise remains a fairly passive character throughout the narrative, Kamata (The Beautiful One Has Come, 2015, etc.) pulls off the difficult trick of writing a book that’s thoughtful and slow-paced without overexplaining or making the story plodding. Her writing is clear and confident, with an eye for vivid details—“dormer windows like lidded eyes” or “one round little pea...like a jewel.” She unfortunately uses the term “Gypsy” in place of “Roma” more than once, and Miguel’s air of mystery may read as stereotypical. But readers carried along by Elise’s tale will find themselves wanting more.
A lyrical, compelling coming-of-age story with magical elements.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-942545-59-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Wyatt-MacKenzie Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
