Straub can still tease the imagination and chill the blood with the best of them. But it’s probably time to bury Tim...
The “lives” lived by a novelist’s creations intersect and conflict in this tricky sequel to last year’s lost boy lost girl.
Successful writer and troubled Vietnam vet Tim Underhill (who’s been popping up in Straub’s fiction ever since 1988’s Koko) is troubled by cryptic e-mail messages from unidentified domains that, he slowly realizes, seem to have been sent by former acquaintances who’ve recently died. In a parallel plot, widowed Willy Patrick, Newberry Award–winning author of the YA fantasy novel In the Night Room, undergoes a series of traumatic misadventures that, taken together, suggest very sinister things about Mitchell Faber, the suave globetrotting executive she plans to marry. Early clues point to further links between Tim and Willy, and when they “meet” at a bookstore where he’s giving a reading, this rather preposterously convoluted tale’s metafictional intentions are made clear. It all has to do with a “mistake” made by Tim in an earlier novel (involving a soulless serial killer)—as Tim is made to understand, by such bizarre figures as a “pissed-off angel” of more than angelic strength and beauty, a most curiously named book collector who becomes his stalker, and a “Familiar Spirit” who establishes contact with Tim via—what else?: e-mail. Willy Patrick’s precise connection to the “flight-from-Bluebeard narrative” that is Tim’s current work-in-progress is more than a bit overelaborated, as the two novelists travel to Tim’s hometown for his brother’s wedding, a visit to a sinister abandoned house where horrendous crimes were committed, and the resolution of Willy’s understandably imperfect grasp of her own reality. Readers of Straub’s previous fiction will eventually tumble to what’s going on—but may well wonder whether the muted payoff was worth so much mazelike artifice.
Straub can still tease the imagination and chill the blood with the best of them. But it’s probably time to bury Tim Underhill, and move on.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2004
ISBN: 1-4000-6252-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2004
IN THE NEWS
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
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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