Good local color, but nothing much to care about here.
Economist editor Miller makes his fiction debut with a bleak tale of fraud and manipulation in early-21st-century Moscow.
The unbridled mayhem of the 1990s has died down a bit, but Western companies are still pouring money into the hands of newly minted Russian conglomerates, and British lawyer Nicholas Platt is writing the contracts. Meanwhile, he’s enjoying the louche pleasures of Moscow nightlife. He’s also enjoying the company of Masha and her sister Katya—well, actually they’re not sisters—and Tatiana Vladimirovna, the old lady they introduce as their aunt, who isn’t a relative either. But by the time Nicholas finds that out, he’s enmeshed in a scheme whereby Tatiana will swap her apartment in the center of Moscow for new suburban digs and $50,000 in cash. The scheme is as obviously phony as the deal Nicholas is brokering between a consortium of banks and a Cossack who purports to be fronting for a company that will build “a floating oil terminal somewhere up in the Barents Sea,” and Nicholas’s narrative, addressed to his wife-to-be back in London, makes it clear that he more or less knew it from the start. A protagonist’s willed blindness can be a strong premise (as in Jane Smiley’s Good Faith, 2003), if the author makes palpable the reasons for such self-deception. Sex with Masha, a decidedly down-market temptress, just doesn’t seem motive enough. Miller, formerly a Moscow correspondent for Economist, vividly evokes the no-holds-barred atmosphere of the city in its early-capitalist stage, but it’s seedy rather than alluring, and as Nicholas deliberately ignores glaring signs that he’s being conned, readers may well find him stupid rather than tragically deluded. Depressive asides to his English fiancée reinforce our feeling that he deserves the comeuppance he gets.
Good local color, but nothing much to care about here.Pub Date: Feb. 22, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-385-53344-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2010
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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