In Linse’s (How to Be a Man, 2014) novel, three orphaned siblings must rely on each other through a host of tragedies and triumphs.
CJ, Tibs and Maggie are siblings whose lives fell apart when, during their childhood, their parents were killed in an accident. Their relationships with each as adults other are fraught, and their coping mechanisms, poor. CJ, the eldest, throws herself into her bartending job and relationships with unavailable men. Tibs idolizes Ernest Hemingway and dreams of becoming an author but can’t bring himself to actually begin writing. And sweet Maggie, the youngest, throws a wrench into all of their lives when she falls for Jackdaw, a macho cowboy. When Maggie gets pregnant, Jackdaw reluctantly agrees to marry her but then withdraws completely when their child is born with spina bifida, leaving Maggie to rely on her siblings for support. Linse certainly has a feel for the world of rodeos, ranches and the West. Her descriptions ably evoke the landscape, with its “long string of beaver ponds that ripple and dazzle in the light.” However, certain plot developments—a sudden pregnancy, the birth of a special needs child—don’t feel organic to the narrative. Instead, the story turns into a soap opera, particularly when, late in the novel, an unexpected love triangle develops and is left unresolved. Furthermore, the story is divided into short chapters that alternate perspectives among the four main characters. While this can certainly be an effective storytelling technique, the chapters are so short (sometimes just a page or two), the transitions feel jarred and choppy. Each character therefore feels a little underdeveloped, left to the devices of the machinery of the plot. Ultimately, the story has its poignant elements but feels a little too trite for its own good.
A moving but uneven depiction of a family struggling through loss.
Pub Date: July 2, 2014
ISBN: 978-0991386734
Page Count: 328
Publisher: Willow Words
Review Posted Online: July 15, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
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
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SEEN & HEARD
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