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COAL RUN

Name: COAL RUN
Author: Tawni O’Dell
ISBN: 0-670-89995-X

by Tawni O’Dell ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 2004

Powerful and uncompromising, yet radiant with love: this one's pretty close to a masterpiece.

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Triumphantly fulfilling the promise of her bestselling debut (Back Roads, 2000), O’Dell examines the tangled, enduring bonds of family and community in a Pennsylvania mining town.

After 16 years in Florida, Ivan Zoschenko has come back to Coal Run as deputy to its easygoing sheriff, who seems unfazed by his crippled knee and heavy drinking. To the locals, Ivan is still the legendary college football player destined for the pros until he injured himself in a freak accident at the abandoned mine where his father and 96 other men died in an explosion when Ivan was 6. The sense of having let them down drove him to drink and to Florida, but as the story unfolds in a narrative that mingles present-day action with Ivan's memories, we realize that guilt over a graver misdeed also fuels his self-destructive behavior. Once again, O’Dell inhabits a male mind with sensitivity and acuity. Ivan's cluelessness about women would seem improbable if his first-person narration didn’t reveal emotional scars that blinker his probing intelligence. The author surrounds her hero with full-bodied, vividly rendered characters: his proudly sexual, fiercely independent sister; the Vietnam vet he adored as a boy; his uncomplaining mother, irreparably wounded by her beloved husband’s death; and Reese Raynor, Ivan’s dark shadow, who beat his young wife into a coma and whose release from jail propels the plot. O’Dell doesn’t soften the lasting damage inflicted on Coal Run and its inhabitants by the J&P Coal Company (all the more contemptible because the characters take it for granted), but against it she sets a passionate affirmation of the communal ties that send the local doctor out to give vaccinations to poor kids and bring everyone to the old mine each year for a memorial service to the dead miners. The tendency to melodrama that occasionally marred her first book is transformed here into a searing tragic vision of working-class people whose dignity comes from stoically doing their jobs, a phrase repeated with increasing resonance as the novel closes with the suggestion that Ivan can now move toward reconciliation with the past and hope for the future.

Powerful and uncompromising, yet radiant with love: this one's pretty close to a masterpiece.

Pub Date: July 1, 2004

ISBN: 0-670-89995-X

Page Count: 368

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2004

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
ANGELS BURNING
by Tawni O’Dell

- BOOK REVIEW
ONE OF US
by Tawni O’Dell

- BOOK REVIEW
FRAGILE BEASTS
by Tawni O’Dell

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BETWEEN SISTERS

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 2003

Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...

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Sisters in and out of love.

Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?

Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.

Pub Date: May 1, 2003

ISBN: 0-345-45073-6

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Ballantine

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE WOMEN
by Kristin Hannah

- BOOK REVIEW
THE FOUR WINDS
by Kristin Hannah

- BOOK REVIEW
THE GREAT ALONE
by Kristin Hannah

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TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

by Harper Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 1960

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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.