Well-intentioned and readable, but very broadly drawn and often gratingly rah-rah.
A feisty middle-aged black woman sheds 70 pounds and rekindles the flame with her preacher husband.
Approaching her 25th college reunion, 220-pound Ada Howard decides to get out of her 3X sweats and work towards that stretchy size-10 black dress at Target. It’s not just that she wants to look good at the reunion for foxy old flame Matt Manson, who appends a handwritten message (“Honey Babe. It’s been too long.”) to the invitation. And it’s not just that her preacher husband, Lucius, might very well be cheating on her. (He’s lost weight, bought a new car and is never home.) Getting slim and healthy is a political issue for Ada. Her three older sisters died of diabetes before they turned 60, and every day at KidPlay, the day care center she runs in Nashville, she sees a parade of oversized African-American women feeding their children the same fattening junk food they eat themselves. So Ada embarks on a program of exercise and diet based on the list of 53 rules that opens this self-help manual delivered in a fictional format. For the most part, the rules are nothing you couldn’t find in an actual diet book—though probably not “Get better hair down there,” which forecasts the earthy humor with which Randall (Rebel Yell, 2009, etc.) in subsequent pages chronicles Ada’s journey toward size 10 and a revitalized marriage. When Ada visits the four congregants she suspects of being her husband’s bit on the side, instead of confessions, she hears a litany of the sexual tributes to his wife that Preach recited when invited to adultery. His highly improbable confidences are typical of the novel’s relentlessly positive tone; Randall’s emphasis on black pride and self-respect, while understandable, makes for predictable fiction. A quick aside about a betrayal by Ada’s best friend Delila strikes the only note of adult complexity in a book dedicated to simple cheerleading.
Well-intentioned and readable, but very broadly drawn and often gratingly rah-rah.Pub Date: May 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-60819-827-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2012
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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