A sometimes-disorienting but heartfelt look at the scope of a modern family’s emotions.
Scott’s debut family drama spotlights the ebb and flow of relationships between parents, spouses, siblings, and others as they navigate the immovable forces of life.
Dave and Debbie are no strangers to the strains of time, money, and work demands on a marriage. At the novel’s outset, Dave is plagued by the long hours that are typical of modern, white-collar America, frequently forgetting the time of night—and his family—as he juggles numbers at his financial job. Debbie, stressed by her double workload of caring for their adolescent children, Aidan and Summer, and covering long night shifts as a nurse at the local hospital, begins having her doubts as to whether their relationship can hold up. After some heated discussion, Dave resolves to spend more time with his family and less time at the office. Dave, Debbie, Aidan, and Summer set off together to Debbie’s parents’ lake house for a relaxing weekend together. However, Dave, lost in thought, nearly swerves off the road at a hairpin bend. As the story progresses, each member of the brood becomes embroiled in challenging personal dramas: Summer suffers her first real heartbreak; Debbie is tempted by the adoration of a colleague; Dave continues to struggle with reconnecting with his wife; and Aidan is involved in an accident that sends shock waves beyond just his nuclear family. Although the book’s pacing smoothly follows the central characters for much of the book, Scott later introduces Dave’s vivid, uncanny dream states, which will begin to rock readers’ perceptions of what’s really happening. This uncertainty will help to keep readers engaged in the cyclical nature of Dave and Debbie’s marriage struggles. However, it’s introduced at a fairly late stage, and the story may require patience on the part of readers at some points. The key to the true meaning of Dave’s dreams will be a rewarding revelation for steadfast readers.
A sometimes-disorienting but heartfelt look at the scope of a modern family’s emotions.Pub Date: April 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5116-0796-4
Page Count: 360
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 11, 2015
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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