Novak’s striking debut works up to a climactic frenzy whose deepest revelations aren’t about mysterious Eleanor, but about...
A hundred years after a frightful murder spree leaves a New England house haunted, an equally haunted woman arrives from the city destined in spite of herself to break the curse—or repeat it.
Her nerves worn to shreds by repeated exposure to child-abuse cases, Detective Leslie Stone snapped one day, shooting the police suspect in the killing of a little girl. Exonerated on murder charges by a temporary insanity plea, she’s just emerging from a mental institution when her contractor husband Greg is invited to the insular town of Wellington to supervise the restoration work on Five Mile House, fallen into disuse and disrepair ever since Eleanor Bly killed six of her seven children and then leapt to her death from an upper window. Greg has never done this sort of work before; his sole qualification is Leslie herself, a double for the fearsome Eleanor Bly. As Leslie settles queasily into a new routine, taking Wellington family attorney Phillip Hogarth as her lover and volunteering three mornings a week at the Wellington Historical Society, she realizes that Eleanor Bly, whose spirit haunts Five Mile House (and, ever more insistently, the narrative) who longs for the rescuer she sees in Leslie, isn’t the only thing disturbing about Wellington. Gwendolyn Garrett, the historical consultant who first sought Greg for the job, is a practicing witch hot on the trail of a cabalistic volume called the Analecta Seriatus; most of the other women in Wellington seem to be members of her coven; and the town’s history is so closely bound up with its most notorious figure that Harry and Diana Wellington plan to refurbish the place as a Witches of Wellington theme park (think Colonial Williamsburg redesigned by Nathaniel Hawthorne).
Novak’s striking debut works up to a climactic frenzy whose deepest revelations aren’t about mysterious Eleanor, but about Leslie and the loyalties she once took for granted. (Author tour)Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2000
ISBN: 1-58234-096-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2000
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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