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.įour men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions-as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer-and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives. 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. 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. 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. 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. Although the plot is not exactly watertight, the revelations are parceled out so skillfully that disbelief remains suspended until the satisfying if not entirely plausible close.Ī 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. Her father relocated her to San Diego, where, ignoring Frank’s warnings to avoid music, she found new outlets for her extraordinary talent. Marshals skilled at making people disappear. Her suicide was faked by her father and Tom, both ex-U.S. We learn that she was accused of murdering her violin teacher and was about to stand trial. Jeannie, another family friend, appears helpful, but what is she hiding? Riley discovers that her father was paying Tom off, but why? Early on, Lisa’s voice, and her version of events, emerges. Her father’s friend Tom exhibits a threatening mien. (Her mother had succumbed to cancer years before.) While getting ready to sell his North Carolina real estate-her childhood home and a trailer park-Riley runs across several people who harbor secrets about her family’s past: Danny, a mentally troubled Iraq War vet, nurses grudges against his parents while living as a virtual hermit on the outskirts of the trailer park. Twenty-three years later, Riley, who has become a high school guidance counselor to help depressed teens like Lisa, is settling her father Frank’s affairs after his death from a heart attack. Lisa’s younger siblings, Danny, 7, and Riley, 2, will be told only that Lisa suffered from depression and committed suicide. Shortly after the tragedy, the family moves to North Carolina. Unaccountably, on a winter morning, Lisa’s kayak (though not her body) is discovered in the ice-bound Potomac near the family’s Alexandria, Virginia, home. By the age of 17, she's a violin virtuoso with a bright future. One way or another, Lisa MacPherson, a musical prodigy, has always dominated the lives of her family. After her father’s sudden death, a daughter discovers disturbing facts about a sister presumed dead more than two decades earlier.
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