A tender portrayal of those left behind in the wake of tragedy.
Mapson’s quirky, character-driven novels (The Owl & Moon Café, 2006, etc.) explore loneliness under the big skies of the West, and this effort is no exception as a young widow rebuilds her life on her Central California farm.
Though Glory Solomon’s husband died almost a year ago, she still sits in the closet with his clothes and cries. At least she has the animals to keep her going: goats and chickens, abandoned horses and two rescue dogs she is training for adoption. To help make ends meet she is using the farm as a wedding venue—her late husband Dan built a chapel on the property, which also boasts Solomon’s Oak, an ancient white oak that draws tourists and botanists from all over. Coupled with Glory’s cooking skills, the whole wedding thing just may save her from working another day at Target. And then along comes Juniper McGuire, a 14-year-old foster kid Glory hesitantly agrees to take in. She and Dan used to foster-parent boys, and under Dan’s gentle tutelage they became kind young men, but Glory’s not sure she can handle Juniper, an angry girl with facial piercings and a bluebird tattooed on her neck. But then a kind of fate intervenes as she discovers who Juniper is: Juniper’s older sister Casey was famously abducted four years earlier while walking her new dog—a rescue Glory herself gave the family and who made its way back to Glory’s farm the day of the kidnapping. When Juniper meets Cadillac again, the two become inseparable, and Glory thinks this relationship may save the girl from her own destruction. Despite school trouble with Juniper, Glory’s life is slowly improving—the chapel is getting more bookings and she meets Joseph Vigil, a former cop (living with chronic pain from a shooting that took his partner) who came to photograph Solomon’s Oak and has stuck around to help tutor Juniper. Mapson’s three damaged souls, and the ghosts in their lives, are able to find in each other just the thing to make life worth living.
A tender portrayal of those left behind in the wake of tragedy.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-60819-330-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Aug. 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2010
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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