Powerful and uncompromising, yet radiant with love: this one's pretty close to a masterpiece.
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
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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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