Library Journal Book Review 1980

A 2003 Newbery Award winner for his book Crispin : The Cross of Lead, Avi is one of the foremost children's and young adults' authors read in the classroom today.

This is the first book-length study of the popular novelist Tom Robbins. Whimsy and humor characterize Robbins' work, but style and language are the keystones. Hoyser and Stookey show how Robbins deftly uses style and humor to depict the absurdities and injustices of our world. His novels constantly challenge perceptions of the world that people automatically label as normal. His fiction criticizes the complacency of humans in a world becoming increasingly alienated from nature and the joy of life. In addition to a critical analysis of each of his novels, the study contains biographical material never before published and the first full-length bibliography on Robbins, including a bibliography of reviews of his fiction. This is the first book-length study of the popular novelist Tom Robbins. Whimsy and humor characterize Robbins' work, but style and language are the keystones. Hoyser and Stookey show how Robbins deftly uses style and humor to depict the absurdities and injustices of our world. His novels constantly challenge perceptions of the world that people automatically label as normal. His fiction criticizes the complacency of humans in a world becoming increasingly alienated from nature and the joy of life. In addition to a critical analysis of each of his novels, the study contains biographical material never before published and the first full-length bibliography on Robbins, including a bibliography of reviews of his fiction. The study features a biographical chapter, a chapter on context and style, and individual chapters on each of his novels, ^IAnother Roadside Attraction^R, ^IEven Cowgirls Get the Blues, Still Life with Woodpecker, Jitterbug Perfume, skinny legs and all^R, and ^IHalf Asleep in Frog Pajamas^R. Each novel is analyzed for plot structure, characterization, and thematic elements. In addition, Hoyser and Stookey define and apply an alternative critical perspective from which to read each novel. The reading of each of Robbins' novels will be enriched by this perceptive study.

From Love Story in 1970 to Prizes, his most recent bestseller, Erich Segal has created a body of fiction that testifies to the importance of traditional values and virtues in contemporary life. To drive home his views, Segal revitalizes the sentimental novel, which evokes emotion to assert moral precepts. This study, the first full-length examination of his work, explores the development of his art and analyzes each of his seven novels in turn. Pelzer shows how Segal's novels explore the parent-child relationship, the price of success, the importance of love, marriage, and human commitment, and the temptations and pressures that make it difficult for the individual to live rightly. A biographical chapter discusses Segal's career as a novelist and an academic. A chapter on genre examines his fiction in the tradition of the sentimental novel. Each novel is discussed in a separate chapter and analyzed for plot structure, characterization, thematic elements, literary devices, and style. In addition, Pelzer defines and applies a variety of alternative critical approaches to the novels to widen the reader's perspective. A complete bibliography of Segal's work as well as selected reviews and criticism complete the volume. In this study Pelzer shows how both Segal's short, sentimental tales of love and loss and his multi-character sagas, which range wide in time and place, tap into the deeply held beliefs of his readers and assert traditional values. It is this reaffirmation of values that is the source of his popular appeal to American readers.

Anne Tyler's novels strike a deep chord of responsiveness in her readers because her novels bring to life contemporary characters to whom we can instantly relate and in whose experiences we can see mirrored our own. Tyler's novels deal with the human experience: relationships between marital partners, between parents and children...between siblings; the meaning of love; the nature of identity; impermanence and change; and loss and continuity. In Anne Tyler novels, life is a complexity whose texture is built out of multiple layers. In this insightful study, Paul Bail shows us how Tyler constructs the complex reality of life through character, narrative point of view, theme, and literary devices. With the exception of Tyler's earliest two novels, which she prefers to forget, a chapter is devoted to each of the other novels she has written. Among the twelve are her unforgettable novels of family relationships and love...loss and renewal, such as Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, The Accidental Tourist, and Breathing Lessons. Also included is an analysis of Tyler's most recent novel, A Patchwork Planet. Following a biographical chapter that relates Tyler's life to her work, Bail discusses the novels within the literary tradition of Southern regional literature, women's literature, and popular culture. He also explores the influence of religion on her writing. Each novel is discussed in an individual chapter that includes sections on plot, characters, themes, literary devices, historical setting, and point of view. Bail also offers an alternate critical approach from which to read the novel, such as feminist or multicultural criticism. This study is ideal for students and readers of Anne Tyler and will enrich the reading and appreciation of her novels.

American literature is no longer the refuge of the solitary hero. Like the society it mirrors, it is now a far richer, many-faceted explication of a complicated and diverse society—racially, culturally, and ethnically interwoven and at the same time fractured and fractious. Ten women writing fiction in America today—Toni Cade Bambara, Joan Didion, Louise Erdrich, Gail Godwin, Mary Gordon, Alison Lurie, Joyce Carol Oates, Jayne Anne Phillips, Susan Fromberg Schaeffer, and Mary Lee Settle—represent that geographic, ethnic, and racial diversity that is distinctively American. Their differing perspectives on literature and the American experience have produced Erdrich's stolid North Dakota plainswomen; Didion's sun-baked dreamers and screamers; the urban ethnics—Irish, Jewish, and black—of Gordon, Schaeffer, and Bambara; Oates's small-town, often violent, neurotics; Lurie's intellectual sophisticates; and the southern survivors and victims, male and female, of Phillips, Settle, and Godwin. The ten original essays in this collection focus on the traditional themes of identity, memory, family, and enclosure that pervade the fiction of these writers. The fictional women who emerge here, as these critics show, are often caught in the interwoven strands of memory, perceive literal and emotional space as entrapping, find identity elusive and frustrating, and experience the interweaving of silence, solitude, and family in complex patterns. Each essay in this collection is followed by bibliographies of works by and about the writer in question that will be invaluable resources for scholars and general readers alike. Here is a readable critical discussion of ten important contemporary novelists who have broadened the pages of American literature to reflect more clearly the people we are.