A superbly rendered first-person narrative about a depressed woman who may or may not be getting better, this novel was first published in Scotland and shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award. Galloway's sheaf of stories, Blood (1991), was seen here as bleak, powerful, uneven. Here, Galloway all but drowns herself in her scrambled heroine, Joy Stone, a 27-year-old drama teacher who lives outside Glasgow with trembling nerves and a superfine sensitivity to all shades of overcast. Be warned, Galloway's lyric psychological realism is as dense as Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, her page an inventive litter of relentless subjectivity. Joy Stone is not the manic-depressive her name implies; she's just depressed and locked into endless black chat with herself as she reads horoscopes and letters to an advice columnist (``Dear Kathy, Please help me...''). She obsessively cleans her living room, prepares tea and biscuits for a visit from a health visitor from the social service that pays her rent (the overweight health visitor seems as depressed as Joy), goes through her skin-sizzling bathing ritual, throws out fresh food she finds viscous as plasma, uses nail-scissors to keep her pubic hair neat, perfumes between her toes, skips work often, refuses to talk with her psychiatrist about the accidental drowning of her lover and retreats inward. (``Tears drained backwards into my ears. I was floating up toward the ceiling, inflating with something like love: serene and distant as the Virgin Mary, radiating truth from the halo of stars round my head. I knew so much''). The end: midnight whisky-pictures of Joy as a mermaid in black waves. A woman with more problems than you, dreadfully well done.
Pub Date: May 15, 1994
ISBN: 1-56478-046-5
Page Count: 236
Publisher: Dalkey Archive
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1994
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
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