Stories of strength and ethical quandary, but inconsistently rendered.
A collection of stories about hard choices borne of desperation and the stark delineations between classes in both Guatemala and the United States.
Clearman (Todos Santos, 2010, etc.) opens her collection with the novella A Cup of Tears, an ethically fraught adoption tale, alternating among the perspectives of 15-year-old Concepción, wet nurse to a pair of twins; Prudencia, a baby contractor who acquires the toddlers; Doña Merced, who facilitates their adoption; and two American adoptive parents. For all, “this was a fight to survive,” Clearman writes. Concepción wants to escape north. Prudencia’s call to betray her own ethics comes as much from being “up against the knife” of the bill for her mother’s impending surgery as it does from carrying a metaphorical knife against her father and the shame of incest. Love, for Clearman’s characters, is dangerous and often wrong; in A Cup of Tears, particularly, babies are paradoxically the detritus of forbidden union and the emblems of audacious hope. Stories like “The Race” as well as stories like “Saints and Sinners” illustrate the polarity of life in Guatemala and the U.S. Guatemala represents tradition but also poverty and corruption. In America lies opportunity but instability. When Fausto Mendoza Ramirez returns home to prove himself in a grueling race, he must confront his father and his family legacy. Though characters in Clearman’s stories are genetically related, the collection is inconsistent in its ethical weight. The author offers the same photographic eye and acute vision of Guatemalan culture throughout, but the novella’s arresting implications are not echoed in stories like “Turista” or “Fathers and Sons.” Though these repeat the refrain that “the North was taking all our sons,” there is less at stake for these stories' characters, and the stories suffer for lack of the characteristic unease that drives A Cup of Tears.
Stories of strength and ethical quandary, but inconsistently rendered.Pub Date: March 15, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9968384-5-0
Page Count: 236
Publisher: Rain Mountain Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 31, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2017
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
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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