A slightly buriesquad projection of the Pamela theme to a modern setting- a California ranch estate, presided over by an eccentric multi-millionaire, a lady devoted to good works and radical schemes. She picks her "Pamela" out of a tar-paper roofed novel in the country, where her big limousine chances to break down. She takes her along as parlor maid, because as a Seventh Day Adventist, Pamela will work on Sunday, when the rest of the staff want the day off. And she expects Pamela to help keep her good-for-nothing, spoiled nephew off liquor and women. In letters to her mother (sedate, maidenly letters) and to her sister (a bit more romance here), Pamela tells the story of Charles' attempted education, and in turn her persistent avowal of a religious basis of life as the only way she or he can live. In the end, she wins- but not before she has been promoted to secretary, has been wooed by a young poet and a Wobbly serving a jail sentence. Charles promises all she asks, and the story ends in their marriage.... An intentionally naive pandering to the servant girl to riches, with morals intact, craving of what the publishers may feel is mass public. We wonder whether even the fatal charm of the creator of Lanny Budd can entrap the American public with a story of the rewards of virtue. To be sure, the sophisticate can read between the lines a tongue in cheek arraignment of the lives of those to whom riches mean lure for cranks. A crazy world seen through untutored eyes.
Pub Date: April 24, 1950
ISBN: 067012902X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: April 11, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1950
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these...
Figuratively and literally shattering moments of hoRRRRRipilication in Chamberlain, Maine where stones fly from the sky rather than from the hands of the villagers (as they did in "The Lottery," although the latter are equal to other forms of persecution).
All beginning when Carrie White discovers a gift with telekinetic powers (later established as a genetic fact), after she menstruates in full ignorance of the process and thinks she is bleeding to death while the other monsters in the high school locker room bait and bully her mercilessly. Carrie is the only child of a fundamentalist freak mother who has brought her up with a concept of sin which no blood of the Lamb can wash clean. In addition to a sympathetic principal and gym teacher, there's one girl who wishes to atone and turns her date for the spring ball over to Carrie who for the first time is happy, beautiful and acknowledged as such. But there will be hell to pay for this success—not only her mother but two youngsters who douse her in buckets of fresh-killed pig blood so that Carrie once again uses her "wild talent," flexes her mind and a complete catastrophe (explosion and an uncontrolled fire) virtually destroys the town.
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these youngsters who once ate peanut butter now scrawl "Carrie White eats shit." But as they still say around here, "Sit a spell and collect yourself."Pub Date: April 8, 1974
ISBN: 0385086954
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1974
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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