Ten cohesive tales that earn laughs with sincere characters.
A mishmash of oddball and rollicking individuals inhabits a Florida fishing village in this debut short story collection.
Bay Key is an isolated island village on the Gulf Coast. It’s a place for all sorts of people, like Floyd Butler, a drunk who frequents the local M&M Bar. In “The Lottery Ticket,” Floyd is sure he can woo hotel chef Janine if he can just win the Florida lottery. Like many of the book’s characters, Floyd crops up in a number of tales. Even the charming eponymous hero of “Bernard’s Great Adventure,” the Bay Hotel’s director of guest relations (and a basset hound), recurs, as do his hotel-owning caretakers, Todd and Terri Swift. Characters are often shiftless and dabble in alcohol and recreational drugs, including Buddy Palmer and his family in “The Meglodon Curse.” But neither they nor the stories are one-dimensional. In “Jim Anderson’s Ashes,” for example, Jim’s suicide leads to the discovery of his diaries, which enlighten EMT Zeke with details on a fellow Vietnam veteran’s life. This is trailed by “Hemingway’s Best Friend,” in which a storm dredges up nostalgia for Todd—an old videotaped interview from his days as a Miami TV reporter. Curious characters, despite sometimes craving the isolation Bay Key allows, are drawn to one another; loner Ben of “The Blue-Footed Boobies” befriends vacationing elderly couple William and Grace Elliott-Smith thanks to a shared affinity for birds. The collection’s highlight, “Rattlesnake Billy,” epitomizes the tales’ skillful blend of zaniness and sincerity. In it, Billy Joe Kitchens somehow sustains a snake bite from reptilian roadkill. The locals’ swift response is both hilarious (clearing a spot for a helicopter entails arming neighbor Daryl, who once inadvertently shot himself, with a chainsaw) and endearing in everyone’s determination to help. Sanders’ breezy prose makes the book a quick read. In “Up on the Roof,” Terri bemoans the couple’s lack of privacy as hotel owners, with their sex life “more of a memory than a reality.”
Ten cohesive tales that earn laughs with sincere characters.Pub Date: March 27, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5428-9024-3
Page Count: 240
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 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
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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