Colwin's recent death, at a grievously young age, removed one of the fresher, sunnier, funnier, smarter novelists from the scene; this posthumous and fifth novel, though hardly her best, makes you remember that painfully. Jean Louise is a 30-ish book designer for a New York publishing house, regularly hit on by her rakish boss Sven and confused by the disloyalties of her female co-workers—yet she's essentially blissful thanks to her marriage to calm, unanxious chemist Teddy. She has a wonderful best friend, too—Edie, a caterer, who with her black husband Mokie replicates Jean Louise's contentment pretty much down the line. Jean Louise's problem is that at base she feels herself hardly deserving of such happiness- -not for anything she's done, but because of the skeptical, hard-on-herself person she just generally is. When she gives birth to a child, Miranda, the wry joy is only intensified. But a part of her still wonders whether she wouldn't be more temperamentally suited to hopping into bed with Sven the rouÇ and suffering the consequences luxuriously. Everything you expect in a Colwin novel is here—Jean-Louise and Edie, plus their spouses, seem like updates, in fact, of the delightful, too-good-to-be-true pair of couples that roamed through Colwin's best novel, Happy All the Time (1978)—and all that's missing is drama, some wrinkling that might leave any of the characters somewhat different or changed at the end from what they were at the beginning. The lack of architectural tone makes the book read like a series of skits, set-pieces, all feeling a bit skimpy, abridged. Still, Colwin's many fans will savor the willfulness, wisdom, and the sharp-eyed noticings here.
Pub Date: Sept. 15, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-017019-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1993
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
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