Two young women meet in college, pal around in N.Y.C, and sleep with a lot of guys—in this very slight, fey, sentimental imitation of Tama Janowitz and/or Anita Loos: a first adult novel by the author of Short Subject (a 1989 YA book) and the story collection Married Life and Other True Adventures (1990). Edie's the crazy girl and Mona's the sensible one when they first meet after a Humanities lecture their senior year. On first contact Mona is very impressed with Edie's plaid skirt, spiked heels, and motorcycle jacket, and when Edie redubs her ``Monarose...a flower of a name,'' the two become inseparable friends. Donning black velvet and thrift-shop silk, lightheartedly bedding mysterious boys who might someday conceivably become diplomats and older men who (God forbid) could decide at any moment to leave their wives, Edie and Monarose cruise through their final days of college with the sole intent of stomping on and crushing the heavy mantle of Edie's unpleasantly fragmented and Monarose's stultifyingly proper origins. After college, with no goals or ambitions to speak of, the two move erratically in and out of seedy Manhattan apartments and seedier love affairs, creating a satisfying pattern in which Edie causes more and more trouble (flying off to Vienna at a moment's notice on her parents' credit card; bugging the apartment of a former lover), so that Monarose must abandon jobs, lovers, and other friends to rescue her. Monarose doesn't mind: she'd do anything to keep flighty Edie brightening up her life. In the end, though, not surprisingly, it's Edie who latches onto a pompous young businessman, forces him to propose, and defiantly marries him in a lavish, drunken wedding, while Monarose is left to dream alone. Frivolous fiction, East Village-style.
Pub Date: March 10, 1993
ISBN: 0-88064-139-8
Page Count: 176
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1993
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
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