A sometimes-tedious catalog of sociopolitical grievances.
A year after 9/11, agitation and activism take center stage in Southern California in Lefer's latest novel (The Fiery Alphabet, 2013, etc.).
When a jittery security guard blows off her ear in a health-food store, Rae receives an auricular prosthesis, pays off her debts from her settlement, and decides to take a year off from teaching high school English to become a research volunteer at the Los Angeles Zoo. In this conversational novel, Rae often addresses the reader directly: “I’m throwing a lot at you all at once.” And she does: Rae, alongside her best friend, Jennie Kim, and the members of the street activist troupe known as the Gorilla Theater, protests everything from the treatment of baboons at the zoo to the war in Iraq to the requirement that Iranian-born men in the U.S. register with the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Rae admits: “We were fighting on too many fronts.” But Lefer never divulges the source or sources behind Rae’s fervent and frequent outrage. It's only when Rae contemplates her failed marriage to her alcoholic husband that the author offers a poignant, more complex understanding of her character. “Toward the end and in the aftermath of my marriage, see, when you love someone who’s a drunk, all kinds of things happen to your life. It goes beyond the ravages of the disease, beyond the grief and shame over the terrible thing he’s done—which you surely feel more keenly than he does….There’s the hurt and helplessness you feel all the time.” Glimpses of Rae’s inner turmoil, though sporadic, evince a far more compelling storyline than her quest to solve the problems of the world.
A sometimes-tedious catalog of sociopolitical grievances.Pub Date: April 27, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-937677-96-1
Page Count: 328
Publisher: Fomite
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2015
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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