A semieducated girl raises her baby sister in the hills of Appalachia in the first third of this century—and tells us about it, very plainly. Twelve-year-old Rennie Slone, a slightly disguised Verna Mae Slone, is left motherless shortly after her sister Sarah Ellen is born. Working to take care of the farm, the house, and the new baby while her preacher father comes and goes as he likes, Rennie struggles. Here, the little things, trite though they often are, do make a difference, and the details of everyday life are interesting, although Slone tends to rush past the smells, the sounds, the colors that make her world special. Rennie's one goal is to send her sister to the school she was forced to leave during her mother's pregnancy. It happens, of course, and her sister even graduates from college—no small feat, but not surprising. In fact, nothing about life up in Kentucky's Lonesome Holler seems unexpected, but perhaps that is as much the fault of the scrambled chronology as it is of Slone's matter-of-fact tone. The brightest spot is when her first cousin Johnnie comes to live with them and soon enough falls in love with Rennie. When she tells him she believes she was born to be a spinster, he moves out, taking the plot with him. Reworking material drawn from her own 80 years (much of it already covered in nonfiction works like What My Heart Wants to Tell, 1979), the author produces a series of front-porch tales, though not a novel. Novels require development, and fiction. Although a preface says that Slone calls her writing ``faction,'' the actual sequence of events in her/Rennie's life as relayed here doesn't make up a story, and Slone keeps her imagination, which glimmers brilliantly at points, in check. Very good tidbits—local history, heartache, and humor—held too close to the vest.
Pub Date: June 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-8131-1855-7
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Univ. Press of Kentucky
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1994
Anyone who believes in true love or is simply willing to accept it as the premise of a winding tale will find this debut an...
True love flares between two people, but they find that circumstances always impede it.
On a winter day in London, Laurie spots Jack from her bus home and he sparks a feeling in her so deep that she spends the next year searching for him. Her roommate and best friend, Sarah, is the perfect wing-woman but ultimately—and unknowingly—ends the search by finding Jack and falling for him herself. Laurie’s hasty decision not to tell Sarah is the second painful missed opportunity (after not getting off the bus), but Sarah’s happiness is so important to Laurie that she dedicates ample energy into retraining her heart not to love Jack. Laurie is misguided, but her effort and loyalty spring from a true heart, and she considers her project mostly successful. Perhaps she would have total success, but the fact of the matter is that Jack feels the same deep connection to Laurie. His reasons for not acting on them are less admirable: He likes Sarah and she’s the total package; why would he give that up just because every time he and Laurie have enough time together (and just enough alcohol) they nearly fall into each other’s arms? Laurie finally begins to move on, creating a mostly satisfying life for herself, whereas Jack’s inability to be genuine tortures him and turns him into an ever bigger jerk. Patriarchy—it hurts men, too! There’s no question where the book is going, but the pacing is just right, the tone warm, and the characters sympathetic, even when making dumb decisions.
Anyone who believes in true love or is simply willing to accept it as the premise of a winding tale will find this debut an emotional, satisfying read.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-57468-2
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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More faithful to the original but less astonishing than Christopher Logue’s work and lacking some of the music of Fagles’...
Fresh version of one of the world’s oldest epic poems, a foundational text of Western literature.
Sing to me, O muse, of the—well, in the very opening line, the phrase Wilson (Classical Studies, Univ. of Pennsylvania) chooses is the rather bland “complicated man,” the adjective missing out on the deviousness implied in the Greek polytropos, which Robert Fagles translated as “of twists and turns.” Wilson has a few favorite words that the Greek doesn’t strictly support, one of them being “monstrous,” meaning something particularly heinous, and to have Telemachus “showing initiative” seems a little report-card–ish and entirely modern. Still, rose-fingered Dawn is there in all her glory, casting her brilliant light over the wine-dark sea, and Wilson has a lively understanding of the essential violence that underlies the complicated Odysseus’ great ruse to slaughter the suitors who for 10 years have been eating him out of palace and home and pitching woo to the lovely, blameless Penelope; son Telemachus shows that initiative, indeed, by stringing up a bevy of servant girls, “their heads all in a row / …strung up with the noose around their necks / to make their death an agony.” In an interesting aside in her admirably comprehensive introduction, which extends nearly 80 pages, Wilson observes that the hanging “allows young Telemachus to avoid being too close to these girls’ abused, sexualized bodies,” and while her reading sometimes tends to be overly psychologized, she also notes that the violence of Odysseus, by which those suitors “fell like flies,” mirrors that of some of the other ungracious hosts he encountered along his long voyage home to Ithaca.
More faithful to the original but less astonishing than Christopher Logue’s work and lacking some of the music of Fagles’ recent translations of Homer; still, a readable and worthy effort.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-393-08905-9
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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