A coming-of-age story that features a hero as ambivalent as the book's title—and the reader's response is likely to be just about equally so-so. Twenty-six-year-old Aaron Bright, a talented, struggling writer, should be getting married at this point in his life, but he can't quite bring himself to tie the knot—even though the woman in question is talented, beautiful, and fabulously wealthy besides. Aaron loves her, too, so the source of the problem must lie elsewhere—and consequently Lazar spends several hundred pages recapitulating his hero's miserable childhood in an effort to find out what it is. Trauma number one occurred when eight-year-old Aaron watched his father—the whimsical host of a children's TV show in Denver—take a fatal parachute jump. Left to grow up fatherless in the home of his widowed mother, a harried, eccentric violinist, Aaron becomes the quintessential outsider at the elite private school his grandparents insist he attend. Stigmatized by thriftshop clothes and his own nerdy conversation, Aaron suffers years of isolation and self-loathing before he learns to play court jester to a few popular rich boys, thus snagging himself a position on the edge of the ``in'' crowd. From this vantage point, he's able to covet his new friends' girlfriends, share a little in their wealth, and even win a spot at an Ivy League college while most of his friends succumb to drugs and other vices. In college, he becomes a solitary-poet type, and soon enough reels in Clarisse, a beautiful heiress whose dream is to paint portraits of modern ``saints'' and to live with him in happy domesticity. Can Aaron accept his good fortune and marry the girl? Despite the undertow of all those unhappy childhood memories, there's little doubt that a young man with his ambition will see the dilemma through. A connect-the-dots first novel with a studied, self-conscious, sporadically vivid style.
Pub Date: Feb. 2, 1998
ISBN: 0-06-039211-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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