Despite a lack of editorial gumption, this student-run publishing house has turned out a good book.
A three-generation family chronicle by a first-time writer inspired by her grandmother’s diary and published by a small press operated by college students might not entice the average reader, but it works out surprisingly well.
Charley Beck, a young technician at the U.S. Bureau of Engraving and Printing, falls in love with Emma, a post office clerk, daughter of a drunken ex–Civil War doctor. At 37 and well into spinsterhood, she cannot believe her luck, but Charley is the real thing. This being 1893, they marry after a long courtship and combine their savings to build a house. Their only child, Lillie, beautiful and brilliant but no feminist, grows up to marry Ferd, also a Bureau employee. He moves in; Lillie bears nine children and never doubts her good fortune until she dies of pneumonia in 1933. The author creates believable characters whose lives contain plenty of passion and tragedy, but, despite a Washington, D.C., setting, great events pass with barely a mention. Yet history itself is the novel’s best feature. The author has done her homework, infusing her work with convincing details of 19th- and early-20th-century city life, courtship, work, domestic routine (brutal for a woman), education, and medicine. Life was hard even for the middle class; fortunately they didn’t realize it. Readers will easily follow as the author jumps back and forth between generations, but they may drift off during long excerpts from diaries and letters. Whether fiction or not, they read like the real thing: verbose, repetitious, and mostly preoccupied with trivia.
Despite a lack of editorial gumption, this student-run publishing house has turned out a good book.Pub Date: April 28, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-62720-039-4
Page Count: 488
Publisher: Apprentice House
Review Posted Online: April 1, 2015
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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