A sincere story of success in spite of trauma, in a sad and cynical world.
An earnest, parsed, memoirlike depiction of a woman’s life with epilepsy.
If she hadn’t been diagnosed with epilepsy at 14, Mischa Dunn, who, with her Chilean diplomatic elite mother and Irish-American intellectual father immigrated to the U.S. after violent political conflict in Chile hit too close to home, would’ve faced more than her share of challenges. Tracy’s first book, cleverly organized into chapters named for seizure locations—“The Subway,” “The Ministry of Defense” —follows observant, cynical Mischa from 14 to 36 as she copes with the traumas of her medical condition and builds a life. The relationship Mischa has with her seizures is nuanced and complex and serves as proxy for any rupture in life’s peace, mental or physical. The book speaks to a broader audience than epileptics. Mischa says, “Just me. I go to bed with my epilepsy, I wake up with my epilepsy.” The implication rings true throughout the book: we fall asleep as ourselves, rise as ourselves and find our own solutions. Tracy calls her book a “novelry,” a novel of composite stand-alone short story parts, although it reads more like a memoir. Plot and character are replaced by history and opinion in a kind of slice-of-life-style narrative. Individually, chapters are weak threads in Mischa’s story. Mischa’s observations are often cynical, bordering on politely snide, which, because of Tracy’s tendency to tell, instead of show the why and how in her novel, opinions sometimes feel like reductive or insensitive condemnations of certain characters, NGOs Mischa works with or even entire cultures. The many doctors in the book are treated with simplistic, categorical disgust, and Chapter 23, of 27, is a strangely long-winded dialogue between two pregnant women in a coffee shop; watery soliloquies twist the novel toward its somber conclusion in a sudden, disjointed way. Some readers may find interwoven historical or factual information or opinion interesting, but it blurs lines between narrative and authorial voice in at times dangerous, confusing ways.
A sincere story of success in spite of trauma, in a sad and cynical world.Pub Date: April 11, 2011
ISBN: 978-1453834701
Page Count: 279
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2011
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
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