In her highly praised debut, Karbo told the bittersweet stories of Russian ÇmigrÇs in Los Angeles (Trespassers Welcome Here, 1989); this is a more lighthearted ramble through the City of Angels, part Hollywood satire, part domestic comedy. Mouse FitzHenry, a dedicated documentary filmmaker, is shooting a tribal wedding ceremony in Zaire with her British boyfriend Tony Cheatham when she gets a call from sister Mimi in L.A.: their mother Shirl is having brain surgery after being hit by a restaurant ceiling fan. Sixteen years before, Mouse left for Africa after Mimi stole her boyfriend (and fellow-filmmaker), the sexy half-Mexican Ivan Esparza. (Their sibling rivalry simmers all through the novel.) Mouse returns stateside, with Tony. She promises the recuperating but teary Shirl that they will marry, although she has twice rejected Tony (too safe, too decent). Then at a screening of their doc about a Kenyan pickpocket, Mouse runs into Ivan again (``This is phenomenal, Mouse. Really very very good shit''). She agrees to coproduce a film about her wedding; finally, a reason for getting married! But Tony will not cooperate; unbeknownst to Mouse, he is peddling a ``true-life'' African screenplay that climaxes with a Mouse/Tony mountaintop wedding. Meanwhile, a parallel storyline has Mimi taking sweet revenge on boyfriend Ralph (during his How to Write a Blockbuster class) after he returns to his ``almost ex-wife.'' Two set-piece scenes have Tony calling it quits with Mouse at a Malibu fund- raiser (Stars Against Ivory), and Mimi clobbering Mouse at her shower, while Ivan's camera keeps rolling. Karbo can goose Hollywood amusingly, but so can a score of other writers; where she excels is in spotlighting the neglected, whether displaced Russians or documentary filmmakers. A tighter focus on the latter might have transformed a novel that, for all its offbeat charm and funny moments, is too slack, diffuse, and underplotted to pull a reader through.
Pub Date: May 9, 1991
ISBN: 0-399-13597-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1991
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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