A rich and engaging account of particular lives amid history and great change, narrated with real grace by a master...
A fanciful family saga by English author Joyce (Smoking Poppy, 2002, etc.) depicts one of the most eccentric British households since the Mitfords.
With daughters outnumbering sons 7-0, the Vine family is intensely matriarchal—and the fact that Mr. Vine rarely speaks to anyone at home (including his wife) only makes it the more so. Vine’s wife Martha is the heart and soul of the family, a fiercely practical woman who runs her house like a well-organized battleship and brooks no mutiny from any of her crew. But there is an unexpected side to Martha Vine, who is secretly given to occasional visions and prophecies and can sometimes foresee the future. Of all her daughters, only the youngest, Cassie, has inherited Martha’s gift, and Cassie passes it on in turn to her son Frank, conceived in an ill-advised one-nighter with an American GI. Considered unstable by her more level-headed sisters, Cassie is occasionally confined to mental hospitals, but at Martha’s command she’s given shelter by each of the six sisters in turn. As a result, young Frank enjoys a peripatetic childhood, growing up in environments as varied as his aunt Una’s Warwickshire farm and his aunt Beatrice’s Oxford commune. Although none of Frank’s aunts is as unconventional as his own mother, they’re an unusual lot overall, ranging from spiritualist spinsters to free-love Communists, making Frank’s upbringing a good deal more cosmopolitan than that of the average working-class English boy of his era. His story is intertwined with those of his aunts and his grandmother and mother—and of his ruined hometown of Coventry, destroyed during the war but gradually built anew in the 1950s. In Joyce’s telling, it all becomes a portrait of England at large, at once traditional and irreverent, badly worn out by war but determined to start life over again.
A rich and engaging account of particular lives amid history and great change, narrated with real grace by a master storyteller.Pub Date: June 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-7434-6342-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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