Bracingly serious but without pretension, Mattison’s voice is like that of no one else writing today: the demands she makes...
A rigorous novel about a woman whose profession speaks volumes about her own inner life.
Again, Mattison (The Book Borrower, 1999, etc.) explores difficult moral and emotional dilemmas without resorting to easy resolutions. Here, 50-ish Daisy makes her living organizing other people’s clutter, but after years of independent and very sexually active singlehood, she’s recently added some complications to her own existence by marrying Pikko, a 60-ish landlord and apartment complex manager in New Haven with a vaguely mysterious past. Daisy is a bundle of contradictions: judgmental about herself as well as others, she nonetheless gathers around her an odd assortment of misfits; although deeply private, she occasionally hosts radio shows and organizes public meetings. While cleaning up his files, she becomes professionally and sexually involved with a Yale researcher named Gordon, who shows her the funny newspaper headline that titles the novel and becomes the subject of a play put on by an eccentric community theater group with which Daisy has also become involved. Pikko and Gordon, previously acquainted, share a mutual dislike highlighting their different approaches to life. Gordon prides himself on his lack of imagination, while Pikko lives by a strict set of values based on seeing beyond the surface facts. Daisy, who has trouble differentiating among independence, privacy, and secrecy, begins her affair with Gordon assuming it will not affect her marriage, but his cut-and-dried, logical approach to life (and to her) undermines her confidence. As she falls more and more under Gordon’s sway, Daisy shares a secret of Pikko’s with her lover without considering the serious consequences. Her moral certainty shaken, she finally gains emotional clarity. Prickly, complicated characters field a plot that includes an unsolved murder and sexual intrigue—but defies straightforward synopsis: it revolves around ways of viewing experience as much as the experience itself.
Bracingly serious but without pretension, Mattison’s voice is like that of no one else writing today: the demands she makes of her readers are difficult but exhilarating.Pub Date: Aug. 10, 2004
ISBN: 0-06-621378-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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