A delightfully eerie tale led by a likable and steadfast protagonist.
In this debut supernatural novel, a woman’s life in Vancouver turns into a whirlwind of romantic encounters, nightmares of demons, and strange voices inside her home.
Cali Stenson, 24, isn’t exactly fond of her temp job in customer service at Tony’s Furniture Giant. But some promising events happen all at once. She gets a promotion to a permanent gig, makes friends with a few colleagues, and learns that her aloof boss, Sean Stock, may actually be disguising his attraction to her. But while things are looking up at work, her modest house, where she lives with her female cat, Dallas, is a source of agitation. For most of her life, Cali has been plagued by “weird stuff”—unknown voices, recurrent nightmares, and unexplained occurrences, such as lights turning on by themselves. Moving from her childhood home in Toronto to Vancouver hasn’t changed anything, and lately she’s having trouble distinguishing dreams from memories or reality. Soon she is seeing visions, like someone in her backyard, and has reason to believe some dreams are premonitions. There seems to be a threat from the red-eyed demon in her nightmares, but as it turns out, the greatest danger facing Cali may be human and closer than she knows. Cali’s first-person perspective is rife with vivid details, such as lengthy scenes at Tony’s Furniture that center on Cali and Sean’s developing relationship. But this suits Marie’s novel, which is an engrossing hodgepodge of supernatural episodes, from ghostly figures to unnerving dreams with people Cali knows (for example, her sister). Moreover, the highlighted romance is complicated by Deacon Hall, a manufacturer’s rep with an unveiled interest in Cali. Despite her burdens, Cali is a self-assured woman. The story’s only flaw is occasionally trite dialogue or narration (“But I was a grown-ass woman now”). Fortunately, this hardly affects a number of genuinely nail-biting moments, like a dream demon grabbing Cali’s ankles and dragging her off the sofa.
A delightfully eerie tale led by a likable and steadfast protagonist.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-5255-3119-4
Page Count: 193
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2018
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
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SEEN & HEARD
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