Not a great novel, but a good one, and a promising extension of Glass’s already impressive range.
The comforting and alienating effects of family closeness are portrayed with appealing warmth and wit in the third novel from the Massachusetts author (The Whole World Over, 2006, etc.).
It’s a tale of two sisters: city mouse Louisa Jardine, who shapes a career and an erratic love life out of her experience in New York City’s art world, and her younger sibling Clement, an ever-itinerant wildlife biologist committed only to “a wild and freewheeling life, a life of pick up and go.” In juxtaposed chapters narrated by both women, we’re privy to their mutually loving and dependent, and frequently combative, relationship over a 25-year period that begins when Louisa comes home to Vermont following the death of their nearly centenarian great-aunt Lucy, a free spirit whose intelligent independence has been a touchstone for both “Clem’s” adventurous peregrinations and Louisa’s vacillating movements toward and away from marriage and motherhood. Their mother May, a wealthy horsewoman and breeder of dogs who also manages her passive husband and influences her daughters more than they’ll admit, provides the fulcrum that keeps bringing the sisters together even when they appear to have become irreparably estranged. Glass shares Anne Tyler’s gift for comic plotting as a means to reveal character under stress, but a graver note is struck by her understanding of Louisa’s frustrating, enervating mood swings. The arc of the novel in fact isn’t comic, and its elegiac denouement and conclusion are immensely moving. There are arguably too many echoes of the patterns and emphases of Glass’s NBA-winning Three Junes, but this novel digs deeper—particularly in its rich characterization of the mercurial Clem. She’s as sentient and soulful as she is wayward and irritating, and we understand why men are drawn to her flame, then burn up in the intensity of her embracing orbit.
Not a great novel, but a good one, and a promising extension of Glass’s already impressive range.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-375-42275-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2008
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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