A man seeking to make amends reflects on his complicated relationships with his two sons.
Readers of Criswell’s 2012 novel Peacemaker will recognize the sequel’s opening courtroom scene, but the point of view will be unfamiliar. In the earlier book, readers watched through the eyes of 18-year-old Jayson “Shorty” Jackson as he came before a judge in a Michigan state court at the end of serving two years in juvenile detention for shooting his friend Michael Stephens. Stephens was a promising student with a scholarship to Michigan State University. In the audience were Jayson’s relatives, including a thin, wiry man he barely recognized at first as his father, Jayson “Big Man” Jackson. Peacemaker described the son’s fraught relationship with his father through the son’s eyes; in Criswell’s sequel, the perspectives are reversed and expanded. “Big Man” not only tells his own story in these pages, but, in an unexpected elaboration that Criswell handles adeptly, he also learns the story of his own father, “Pops,” and his Uncle Buddy, told in long flashback scenes in which Jim Crow Mississippi and racially charged midcentury Detroit come to life in significant detail. (Pops recalls the 1967 Twelfth Street Riot in Detroit: “It looked like something out of a war zone. The street was in total chaos. Folks were screaming, fighting, breaking windows, flipping over cars, looting and burning down businesses.”) The narrative is significantly complicated with these rapid-fire shifts in time frame, switching from Pops’ story to his son’s and grandson’s, but Criswell controls the material with an immense degree of skill, pacing her revelations about all three characters so that the generational story never loses its energy. Readers of the earlier volume will know some of the key plot surprises before they happen, but the sequel is knowingly crafted for newcomers as well, investing all of its main characters with three-dimensional believability. They may at times think simplified, negative things about each other, but the reader is never tempted to follow suit. Indeed, the struggle that Criswell’s men have being good fathers and sons is the most rewarding aspect of this gripping novel.
A historically detailed, emotionally rich story of three generations of men dealing with and sometimes evading their duties to one another.
Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4787-6551-6
Page Count: 315
Publisher: Outskirts Press Inc.
Review Posted Online: Dec. 26, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
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