One of Just’s best works: stuffed with surprises, sparkling with insights.
Fourteenth outing for Just (The Weather in Berlin, 2002, etc.), who, supple as ever, takes coming-of-age material and puts his distinctive stamp on it.
Wils Ravan may live in farm country outside Chicago, but he’s no rube; he’s been sneaking into a Chicago jazz club since he was 15. Now 19 and wise beyond his years, his urbane narrative voice never seems discordant, a neat trick. His father, Teddy, a rock-ribbed Republican, owns a printing business, where he’s a paternalistic employer, shocked when his people strike. Thinking the Reds may be stirring the pot—it’s the early 1950’s—Teddy hires strikebreakers and carries a gun. When a brick crashes through the window during family dinner, Wils realizes what it means to protect your loved ones and bonds with his father as never before. Then the strike peters out (no winners) and Wils lands a summer job with a Chicago tabloid while going to debutante parties at night. To the North Shore crowd, Wils is newspaper riff-raff; to the reporters, he’s one of the exploiting classes. Caught between the two, he learns that perception can be everything. Then he meets Aurora, so different from the other airheads, no doubt because she’s the daughter of Jack Brune, a divorced Freudian therapist. The rapport is immediate, but the two fight over secrets: He doesn’t believe in having any, she does. Secrets, and their inevitability in even the closest relationships, are what the novel is about, and coming of age means only a partial de-coding of the mysteries. Wils will lose his virginity with Aurora, but their happiness is short-lived; the unpredictable Jack, a man of many secrets, shoots himself after a quarrel with his mistress Consuela, an exotic Greek Cypriot. Aurora orders Consuela out of the house; Wils fails to take his girl’s side, and the lovers become strangers. Wils emerges from his baptism of fire with enough mysteries to ponder for a lifetime.
One of Just’s best works: stuffed with surprises, sparkling with insights.Pub Date: July 8, 2004
ISBN: 0-618-03669-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2004
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
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
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BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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