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THE HARD TO CATCH MERCY

Name: THE HARD TO CATCH MERCY
Author: William Baldwin
ISBN: 1-56512-025-6

by William Baldwin ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 1993

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Episodes from a southern boyhood: family intrigue, post-Civil War history, race, religion, and superstition are all part of the mix in Baldwin's meandering first novel. It's 1916. Our narrator, 14-year-old Willie T. Allson, lives in the tiny coastal town of Cedar Point, South Carolina, with his nonagenarian Grandpa, his parents, Maum Anna, the redoubtable black servant who has kept him alive, and his playmate Sammy, Anna's nephew. The Allsons live in the shadow of the war, when the Union Navy destroyed the family home and a valuable dowry disappeared. Meanwhile, Willie's placid childhood is enlivened by the arrival of his go-getting cousin, Uncle Jimmy, whose aggressive courtship of Amy Mercy, a poor white girl from the swamp, precipitates a tragedy. Both Uncle Jimmy and Willie love Amy dearly; she dies suddenly (accidental poisoning), and her fearsome brother, the Hard to Catch (he excels at retrieving lost animals), disrupts her funeral and rides off with her body. The Hard to Catch is a devil- figure against whom Willie's silver cross offers only partial protection; his death at Willie's hands ends the novel and marks Willie's passage into manhood. Yet the conflict between these two erupts only spasmodically, competing with other incidents—like the arrival of mysterious Aunt Lydia from Paris, who smokes, paints her fingernails, and believes ``the Negro in the South was much maligned'': food for thought for Willie, who has accepted Grandpa's poisonous fantasies of a Negro uprising ushering in a cannibal kingdom. As the outside world comes knocking, and Uncle Jimmy and Sammy enlist, so the gentleness of the opening is eclipsed by a succession of violent deaths. Baldwin seems to back into this darker material almost inadvertently, suggesting a lack of control. That's a pity, too, because overall Baldwin's debut has considerable charm, tall tales and all. (First printing of 20,000)

Pub Date: June 1, 1993

ISBN: 1-56512-025-6

Page Count: 464

Publisher: Algonquin

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1993

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
A GENTLEMAN IN CHARLESTON AND THE MANNER OF HIS DEATH
by William Baldwin

- BOOK REVIEW
MRS. WHALEY AND HER CHARLESTON GARDEN
by Emily Whaley & William Baldwin

- BOOK REVIEW
THE FENNEL FAMILY PAPERS
by William Baldwin

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SUMMER ISLAND

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2001

The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...

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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

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE WOMEN
by Kristin Hannah

- BOOK REVIEW
THE FOUR WINDS
by Kristin Hannah

- BOOK REVIEW
THE GREAT ALONE
by Kristin Hannah

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LAST ORDERS

by Graham Swift ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 5, 1996

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Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.