A well-told account of a striver and dreamer who got some of what she wanted.
Appel tells the story of the colorful life and death of Mandy Flanagan in this debut literary novel.
Connecticut, 1983. People gather in the town of Wallingford to attend the funeral of Mandy Flanagan, a former theater actress who spent much of her life in New York. Attendees include Mandy’s severe, somewhat jealous sister, Barbie; her newspaper-hoarding younger brother, Ned; her gay niece, Jan, who has returned after eight years away in San Francisco; Jan’s former girlfriend Terri, who is now married to a man and has three children; and a number of older men who hold Mandy in particularly high regard. The tale of Mandy’s life begins to unfold: the child of working-class Irish immigrants in South Boston, Mandy agreed at 17 to marry the scion of a Boston Brahmin family, Henry Russell—even though she had no intention of not becoming a Broadway star or limiting herself to the affections of one man. They elope to New York, and the marriage doesn’t last long; Mandy cycles through lovers—some significant, some not—in order to advance her career. Now, decades later, old lovers and family members gather, some meeting for the first time to reflect on and correct their versions of Mandy—and of themselves. Appel writes in the natural prose of a raconteur, rising occasionally to the level of lyricism when praising her heroine, as here where she is seen through the eyes of Henry during a trip to the beach: “He thought she could be a beacon for sailors, anchored against the wind and the sea, except that he was sure the men would want to come closer to see for themselves the wild green tassels blowing on her dress, enticing them like a siren, power swirling around her.” It’s a wide-ranging tale, full of minor characters and digressions, and the reader isn’t always sure where things are going. Even so, Appel manages to hold her web of malcontents (and the novel) together with her easy narration and her larger-than-life protagonist.
A well-told account of a striver and dreamer who got some of what she wanted.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-0-9977220-8-6
Page Count: 299
Publisher: DartFrog Books
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2019
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
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