A challenging but ultimately uplifting novel.
In Muro’s debut novel, a spiritual young man comes of age in unusual circumstances.
The story begins with Eddie looking back on his youth living on the grounds of a Chicago insane asylum in the 1960s. Early on, it’s clear that the teenage Eddie is spiritually gifted. Despite where he lives, where his mother works as a doctor, he forms a Bible study group with a friend since “[a] need to read scriptures burned within Eddie.” He also speaks of a “friend” within himself who helps guide him through life. His relationship with God, and with the inmates, drives the narrative. Muro creates a strange world, as readers would expect a mental hospital to be, but it’s also as real as everyday life. The patients’ back stories illustrate the corruption and injustice that drove the mental health system at the time. Some inmates are foster children with nowhere else to go, and others are political dissidents shut away on spurious charges. Muro’s novel is based largely on his own experiences growing up in an asylum, where his father worked. It’s not for the faint of heart; almost as soon as it opens, for example, Eddie witnesses a priest molesting his younger sister. Readers go on to learn that Eddie’s love interest, Patricia, was sexually abused by her father, and many other patients in the asylum have similarly gruesome pasts. However, Muro doesn’t gratuitously describe these horrors. Instead, in well-paced, readable prose, he shows how these stories contributed to Eddie’s spiritual development. In the end, Eddie manages to bring light to the afflicted patients and, ultimately, to himself, even in the midst of tragedy. Muro develops clear themes over the course of the novel, showing Eddie’s relationship to the faith in which he was raised and to the faith he later finds. As a result, the book will likely appeal to habitual readers of inspirational works.
A challenging but ultimately uplifting novel.Pub Date: March 20, 2013
ISBN: 978-1475155136
Page Count: 428
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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