A few clunkers, a few gems and many readable, very human slices of life.
According to the introduction by PEN/Faulkner finalist Packer (Drinking Coffee Elsewhere, 2003), these 20 stories from American magazines represent “southerners” rather than “Southerners,” the dividing line between realism and (mythic) stereotype.
Several stories straddle that line. R.T. Smith titles his lyrical but familiar anti-war Civil War story with an iconic Southernism, “Wretch Like Me.” The title of Clyde Edgerton’s “The Great Speckled Bird” is also blatantly iconic, and Edgerton acknowledges in his afterword—each writer describes his or her story’s origins—that his tale, about a thief who takes a Bible salesman as his assistant in crime, is a purposeful tribute to Flannery O’Connor; alas, O’Connor did O’Connor better. The more successful stories are firmly contemporary. In many of the best, young protagonists struggle with the kind of troubled families found everywhere. The opener, Holly Goddard Jones’s beautifully crafted “Theory of Reality,” delves into a young girl’s shifting awareness of sex and its danger. Ecological and emotional dangers present themselves to the young boy whose father kills infected cattle for a living in Pinckney Benedict’s “Bridge of Sighs.” In Mary Miller’s “Leak” and Daniel Wallace’s “The Girls,” girls broaching adolescence live in awkward affection with their fathers. In Amina Gautier’s “The Ease of Living,” a teenager’s mother sends him to stay with his ailing grandfather in Tallahassee to get off the New York streets. Social issues thread through the stories with mixed effect. “Child of God” by Jennifer Moses, about a former addict, leaves a do-gooder aftertaste, but in “First Husband, First Wife,” Jim Tomlinson uses drug-dealing and legal bureaucracy to create a heart-wrenching love story. And in “Back of Beyond,” about a pawnbroker named Parson who must visit his estranged brother’s farm because Parson’s nephew has stolen and pawned a shotgun to support his meth habit, Ron Rash turns what could be clichés of white-trash Southernness into a masterpiece on rectitude and family.
A few clunkers, a few gems and many readable, very human slices of life.Pub Date: Aug. 12, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-56512-612-1
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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