From the author of Lily Beach (1993), a pleasant-enough love- cures-all saga set in a Brooklyn neighborhood on the brink of gentrification. Zoe Finney has moved to Park Slope with her six-year-old daughter Rose and her deeply depressed husband Jamie. She's sold the Sutton Place co-op inherited from her husband's ultra-wealthy family and has set out to live her own way. Meantime, poor Jamie lies quasi-catatonic all day, while Zoe pines for sex and comforts herself with compulsive shoplifting. And gets to know her handsome divorced neighbor, Keevan, a sensitive schoolteacher who seduces her with Clue games and the kind of full-throttle adoration that neither her parents nor her husband have given her. Kid-at-heart Keevan also wins the trust and love of troubled little Rose. But some sort of stuff has to happen before the happy trio can sign on for happily ever after. The various salt-of-the-earth types who populate the neighborhood must negotiate some obligatory life crises: The liveliest subplot allows Keevan's bitter sister-in-law Patty to get a makeover, jettison her cheating husband, and discover the joys not only of dating but of cooking with lemongrass; Keevan must cure himself of his suppressed anger at women, which emerged during his first marriage (he knocks this task off with surprising ease); and in order to start loving herself, Zoe must get arrested for shoplifting and learn that Keevan still cares. When Jamie finally snaps out of it, puppy-eyed in his gratitude at Zoe's patience, she must go through some long-winded vacillations between duty and passion before Jamie selflessly decides to renounce her so that, without even having to make a difficult choice, she can be with Keevan. A standard-issue fairy tale, then, rescued from potential dreariness by its likable characters and its nostalgic and vivid rendering of a neighborhood where benign nosiness still reigns.
Pub Date: May 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-688-14589-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1997
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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