Stories that tick away with the precision of perfectly wrought timepieces.
Thirteen splendid stories in an elegant third collection from Robinson (Sweetwater, 2003, etc.) range widely to give us a peek into the obsessions and troubles of the well-versed and well-off.
The title story inserts a British opera expert into the suburban guestroom of a volunteer for a local music festival. The hostess is so eager to please the festival head that she doesn’t bother to ask her husband if he would mind a “perfect stranger” as a houseguest for the weekend. By the end of this deft tale, Robinson has captured all three characters beautifully, along with the shifting nuances of marriage. “The Treatment” begins bluntly (“Here is what I do each morning”) and proceeds to describe in suspenseful detail the horrors and hopes of a woman who takes a “chilled golden globe” from the refrigerator each morning, warming up a powerful antibiotic she must feed into a plastic tube inserted into her bloodstream, in hopes it will cure her of a long-term disease. The narrator of “The Football Game” compares her own artist father and progressive mother unfavorably to her boarding school roommate’s family (“Their family seemed to unwind, like a spool, into a perfectly woven fabric . . . ”). By the end of the Yale-Bowdoin game, where the two girls keep her parents waiting while they dally with two Yalies, she has learned that the world outside her family was much larger than she had imagined, and more complicated—“more dangerous and beautiful.” “The Face Lift” follows the years-long trajectory of a friendship between former classmates, one a Pennsylvania country girl, the other a wealthy, seemingly carefree Salvadoran. The narrator, divorced and childless, seems to envy Cristina’s wealth, her marriage, her children, until she learns of a violent incident in San Salvador that almost cost Cristina her life.
Stories that tick away with the precision of perfectly wrought timepieces.Pub Date: May 3, 2005
ISBN: 0-375-50918-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2005
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
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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