Both haunted and haunting
A ghost story that twists urban legends with the identifiable struggles of a latchkey kid.
It’s the summer of 1979, and young Ray is thrilled when he and his mother, stepfather and three older brothers finally move out of the projects and into a converted duplex in Austin, Texas. The neighborhood has everything a kid could ask for, including a dirt lot where Ray and his friends build a tree house. Ray’s youngest brother, Richard, has a special gift for storytelling and the pair spend many an afternoon high in the branches, entertaining their friends. Soon Ray learns that a terrible fire destroyed the house that once stood on the empty lot, killing the family inside. Ray’s friends say the remains are still in the lot, buried in a hole that’s guarded by an angry spirit. To prove them wrong, Ray jumps in the hole—with disastrous results. A ghostly burn victim Ray calls Candle Face crawls out of the ground like the demonic girl of the 2004 film The Ring and into his bedroom, enacting a vendetta that’s reminiscent of the 2001 thriller The Grudge. This alone would send shivers down the spine of any kid who has ever chanted “Bloody Mary” in the bathroom mirror, but the horror of the book also lies in the real world. Ray’s overworked parents have little time to notice when Richard, a star student, begins losing interest in his schoolwork, or how Ray is often the victim of his older brothers’ bullying. Between a vengeful spirit and a family in crisis, if Ray is to make it out of his childhood alive, he’ll have to learn how to fight his own battles. Now a soldier facing deployment to Kosovo, a grown-up Ray narrates, offering hindsight and the occasional italicized foreshadowing. In a coming-of-age story that’s well paced and layered with emotion, Mills creates moments of true suspense through guileless prose as he unearths a family tragedy.
Both haunted and hauntingPub Date: April 24, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4500-7222-9
Page Count: 374
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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