Although this novel’s dialogue tends to lack panache, the story as a whole offers intriguing circumstances and outcomes.
Trammel (18 Years of Grace and Mercy, 2012) offers a novel about the lives of three intersecting characters and their relationships with God.
Benjamin lives in a pleasant condominium in Silver Spring, Maryland, and he’s doing quite well for himself, at least on the surface. He’s a college student by day and a drug dealer by trade, working for a man known to most people as “Hard Time.” The two are exacting and discreet, and, along with Benjamin’s friend Winn, they prove highly successful in a business that sends many others to jail; as Hard Time tells people, the reason he got his nickname is “because the police have a hard time catching my ass.” But how long will their luck last? Meanwhile, in New York City, an aging prostitute’s life is about to change. After a longtime customer offers her $10,000 if she’ll give up her profession, she sees it as an opportunity to return home to her troubled family. As she discards her street name, “Sunny,” for her given name, Hannah, she knows that a homecoming is necessary, though it certainly won’t be easy. Elsewhere, Marco Gibson has just been freed from prison in Virginia. After 20 years and nine months of being locked up, he’s determined to avoid the temptations of his drug-dealing brother, Hard Time. His main goal is to eventually serve his community and expound upon his Christian faith, but he knows well that the path ahead of him is steep. Trammel sets the stage for a collision of characters who are already connected, though they may not all realize it. Just what this collision will bring makes up the heart of this touching tale, which explores the choices that people make in life and their opportunities for redemption. The dialogue does veer toward the obvious at times, as when Marco explains that he doesn’t mind janitorial duties because “I’d rather push a broom in there on the low level than push drugs on the street in a low life.” Nevertheless, the story gets its lasting power from the qualities of its main characters’ personalities—people who may find themselves caught up in dire conditions but who ultimately find ways to look for light at the end of the tunnel.
Although this novel’s dialogue tends to lack panache, the story as a whole offers intriguing circumstances and outcomes.Pub Date: Aug. 8, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-62772-395-4
Page Count: 536
Publisher: America Star Books
Review Posted Online: June 24, 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.
