An audacious, often wickedly funny meditation on the vexed precincts of sleep and sex, following the adventures of four characters whose wayward paths repeatedly intertwine, by the author of The Winshaw Legacy (1995). Ashdown, an elderly mansion on the English coast, is serving, in 1983, as a residence for university students. Bright, insecure Sarah lives there, trapped in a relationship with manipulative Gregory, and increasingly drawn to fragile, troubled Robert. Terry, obsessed with cinema, shares with Sarah a sleep disorder: Sarah falls into fugue-like states in which her dreams become more convincing than reality; Terry, fueled by coffee and the drive to succeed, finds it increasingly difficult to sleep at all. Gregory dumps Sarah, and goes off to London to make his way in medical research. Robert disappears, and is later rumored to be dead. Thirteen years later, Terry and Gregory end up back at Ashdown. It has now become the site of Gregory's controversial sleep research clinic. Terry, a failed writer, returns as a patient, having, he claims, been unable to sleep for most of the past decade. Convinced that humanity is tyrannized by sleep, Gregory is secretly searching for a way to teach humans to do without it, experimenting on rats, dogs, and, finally, peoplewith devastating results. Sarah, having tried both marriage and a long lesbian affair, still pines for Robert. The hectic plot provides Coe with plenty of opportunities to satirize British medicine and the increasingly harsh, hustling nature of British society, as well as the confusions of modern love. Weaving through the story, offering a variety of metaphors for creativity and sex, is the dark river of sleep. Gregory gets a grisly, appropriate comeuppance, and an astonishingly transformed Robert reunites with Sarah in one of the strangest, and most moving, encounters in recent fiction. In all: a droll, ingenious novel, its satire nicely leavened by true romance.
Pub Date: March 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-375-40093-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1998
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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