Rock-ribbed Montana love story. Wolfe’s second novel (after the passionate 1995 fable, The Woman Who Lives in the Earth) downplays the more fantastic elements of that earlier tale in favor of muscle-to-bone storytelling. Here, sleek real-estate-demographics analyst Liz Hanson, after 23 years away, returns to Montana to visit her aged grandmother, whose cluttered, chaotic house fronts a lake once used for logging. Once there, Liz discovers a painting on Masonite of a flying woman named Rose, and the story then leaps back to 1948, when Rose Red Crows, a white woman raised by Indians, returns from work in a California aircraft factory to waitress in the tiny town’s only diner. Soon after, in drifts Cody Hayes, a saw-sharpener and gifted machinist. At first, he plans to work in town only long enough to pay for the repairs his old truck needs. But then he meets Rose. Love blooms, but it’s a dangerous love. Dominating the town is the lake, a deep, mysterious body of water that Rose sees as having supernatural qualities, as something able to bestow life or ecstasy on those who believe. After building a sea wall for an ambitious local, Cody works out a method for dredging sunken logs lying on the clear lake’s bottom, with the intention of selling them to a distant mill. Meantime, the diner’s regulars, many of them lusting after Rose themselves, take a fierce dislike to Cody, and when two kids bust open a gas pump and set part of the town and the lake afire with 5,000 gallons of gasoline, he’s framed for the disaster. As a result, Cody’s actually committed to a nearby electroshock-happy asylum for observation—while Rose pines and sets about his rescue. The story soars off into an astonishing climax, nicely mingling the mundane and marvelous and once again demonstrating Wolfe’s stirring, original power as a storyteller.
Pub Date: June 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-06-017412-9
Page Count: 342
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these...
Figuratively and literally shattering moments of hoRRRRRipilication in Chamberlain, Maine where stones fly from the sky rather than from the hands of the villagers (as they did in "The Lottery," although the latter are equal to other forms of persecution).
All beginning when Carrie White discovers a gift with telekinetic powers (later established as a genetic fact), after she menstruates in full ignorance of the process and thinks she is bleeding to death while the other monsters in the high school locker room bait and bully her mercilessly. Carrie is the only child of a fundamentalist freak mother who has brought her up with a concept of sin which no blood of the Lamb can wash clean. In addition to a sympathetic principal and gym teacher, there's one girl who wishes to atone and turns her date for the spring ball over to Carrie who for the first time is happy, beautiful and acknowledged as such. But there will be hell to pay for this success—not only her mother but two youngsters who douse her in buckets of fresh-killed pig blood so that Carrie once again uses her "wild talent," flexes her mind and a complete catastrophe (explosion and an uncontrolled fire) virtually destroys the town.
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these youngsters who once ate peanut butter now scrawl "Carrie White eats shit." But as they still say around here, "Sit a spell and collect yourself."Pub Date: April 8, 1974
ISBN: 0385086954
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1974
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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