A capable though lackluster second novel from Colombian-American novelist Cobo (Tell Me Something True, 2009) about an American man searching Bogotá for his birthmother.
The book begins in Colombia during the era of guerrillas and paramilitary fighters and small towns that are captive to their power struggles. A quiet village is invaded by a group of guerrilla soldiers from the mountains, and their leader Gato has taken a shine to Rita Ortiz, a prim, studious girl. Armed and dangerous, Gato, or Lucas, is really just a boy himself, and the two teenagers sneak off for afternoon trysts. When his commanding officer discovers the affair, Lucas is sent back to their mountain camp as punishment. This could have been merely a bump in Rita’s well-planned life, but soon she discovers she’s pregnant and is sent away before she shames her strict family. She lives in an orphanage while pregnant and works at a flower farm, giving up her baby as soon as he is born. Despite having been a top student with dreams for a prosperous future, Rita stays away from her family and takes a job as a maid. Her baby is adopted by an American couple; two decades later, after a near-fatal car accident (one that ruins his future as a soccer player), Asher Stone goes to Colombia in search of his mother. Though he has caring parents, he asks the same questions many adopted children have: Who I am, I and where do I come from? How Rita Ortiz disappears and reemerges as Joanna López is a far more interesting story than Asher’s search for answers, and when the novel leaves Rita it slows to a halt with Asher’s musings about his origins. It is not clear why his brush with death has sent him halfway around the world. Instead of a focused urgency, his search holds a kind of vague desperation that loses the reader’s attention.
Pub Date: Feb. 29, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-446-51938-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2012
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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