An intense story of one woman’s journey of self-discovery.
In this debut novel, a Brooklyn teacher and mom must find her inner strength after an ugly divorce, despite the growing threat of terrorist attacks against the French school where she works.
Tess Shapiro is a teacher at a school for French expatriates in Brooklyn’s hip Carroll Gardens neighborhood, the mother of two young children and a recent divorcée who is still struggling to navigate the messy aftermath of her failed marriage. Her ex-husband, Patrick, was an emotionless sociopath who cheated on Tess with numerous women, including prostitutes, and showed no remorse. Tess is glad to be rid of him, but it’s hard for her to heal from the hurt he caused. The only distraction she has from her problems is the comics she draws starring her glamorous spy alter ego, Andrea Chambers. But Tess begins to finally move on once she meets Guy, the sexy father of one of her students, who has moved to New York from Paris for only a year while he works for a game development company. Their feverishly romantic fling is a welcome distraction for Tess, especially when a neo-Nazi terrorist group known as NAFKA starts attacking French cultural centers around the world, and anti-French graffiti starts popping up at school. But tragedy brings Patrick’s presence back onto the center stage of Tess’ life, just as she starts to wonder whether Guy may not be what he seems. Egal has created a heartbreakingly relatable character in Tess, a woman who is smart in so many ways but naïve in so many others. Readers should certainly empathize with her battles to find herself amid the smoldering wreck of her marriage. Indeed, Tess’ struggle to deal with the fallout of her relationship with Patrick—not to mention her burgeoning feelings for Guy—creates enough drama on a personal level that the international intrigue of the NAFKA attacks feels unnecessary and oddly forced. The plot takes a weird turn that readers probably won’t expect, one that is welcome but awkward in execution.
An intense story of one woman’s journey of self-discovery.Pub Date: May 20, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-692-61927-8
Page Count: 166
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2016
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
