Mother-daughter fiction of the best flawed sort where, in the midst of cliché, a genuinely admirable amount of truth shines...
Divorced mother, living in barely-there fashion, gets knocked for a loop when real life comes crashing in.
It’s hard to resist a good tale of emotional thaw about a closed-down soul who’s reawakened to the messy highs and lows of the world outside some carefully structured sanctum. This helps explain the success of Juska’s second outing (after Getting Over Robert Wagner, 2002) but doesn’t completely cover it. Our frozen heroine is Charlotte, on the downhill side of her 40s and divorced for 15 years, living alone in a sterile New Jersey condo with strong-willed daughter Emily, in her early 20s and her mother’s exact opposite. At the start, Charlotte is a nightmarish control freak (with family money to support her) who has little to occupy her days and so spends them in a strict regimen of small tasks: cleaning, running errands, getting manicures, watching Jeopardy every night without fail. Given her neuroses, the departures of Emily (first for college, then for a house in New Hampshire that she shares with her black boyfriend Walter) and the earlier one of husband Joe (for Seattle and a more glamorous wife) leave her free to develop a truly unhealthy set of routines and worries. Juska’s portrait of her, though, is an exacting one and hews, however uncomfortably, close to the truth. Charlotte is every mother who wants nothing more than for her children to move back home, who secretly desires their misery in order to feel needed, and who takes every independent action by those same children as a rebuke of her values. There are neighborhoods full of Charlottes, and Juska’s skill in portraying this one is strong enough that her latest is a powerful success in spite of its tendency to melodrama: an unexpected pregnancy, a crisis over Walter’s race, far too many heart-to-heart discussions.
Mother-daughter fiction of the best flawed sort where, in the midst of cliché, a genuinely admirable amount of truth shines forth.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-7434-9350-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Downtown Press/Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2004
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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