Who knows what? Whom can we trust? Like David Mitchell’s Ghostwritten, Cleave’s provocative debut will make readers a little...
A grieving widow and mother composes a letter to Osama Bin Laden.
At points, Cleave’s oddly elegant debut novel about the soul-corroding effects of modern terrorism seems like something George Orwell might have written during the Blitz, had he been a little less concerned with the niceties of punctuation. Cleave opens with a high-wire burst of stream-of-consciousness grief on the part of a youngish but now careworn woman whose husband and son have been killed in a horrific suicide attack on the Arsenal football stadium: “I saw the video you made Osama where you said the West was decadent. Maybe you mean the West End? We aren’t all like that. London is a smiling liar his front teeth are very nice but you can smell his back teeth rotten and stinking.” Sinking into her mourning, she attempts to comfort herself with the thought that at least her son died in the company of his beloved father. It is not enough; sadness gives way to denial, and denial gives way to fury as the bereaved of London begin to suspect that the government knew something about the impending carnage and did nothing to stop it. Our narrator falls in with a fiercely ambitious columnist and an investigative journalist, with whom she had a brief, formless affair before the attack. Working as a civilian in an antiterrorist police unit at Scotland Yard, and urged on by her confidants, she discovers bits and pieces of information that, just in time for a new attack, collectively do much to slip the tether off whatever small mooring she has left in the world: “It is Christmas Eve Osama and this morning I decided you were right after all. . . . Some people are cruel and selfish and the world would be better off without them.”
Who knows what? Whom can we trust? Like David Mitchell’s Ghostwritten, Cleave’s provocative debut will make readers a little uneasy—and that’s okay.Pub Date: Aug. 5, 2005
ISBN: 0-307-26282-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2005
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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