Not a wasted moment in this terrifying and terribly funny book.
“The Troubles” of Northern Ireland haunt the weeks around Christmas 1979 for a prison guard and the mother of a prisoner.
Dean, whose Becoming Strangers (Jan. 2006) was on various prize lists, short and long, gives us John Dunn, an Englishman starting a new job in the Northern Ireland prisons after 20 years in the British Army, and Kathleen Moran, mother of four, one of whom is in Dunn’s prison. The two live on opposite sides of a city that was, it must be remembered, as viciously torn as Beirut not that long ago. Dunn is a loner, a near-orphan who took the army as his family and his path as well as his livelihood, serving in various hot spots during his career. His time in Northern Ireland in the early days of the Troubles taught him to love the place, and his attachment to Angela, the woman with whom he now lives, brought him back to stay. Kathleen Moran has never been off the island. Married young to a windy braggart who is now, predictably, a drunk working in the local pub, Kathleen smokes through her chaotic days, frantic with fear for her oldest child, Sean, an IRA prisoner, and edgy with lust for Brendan Coogan, the handsome spokesman for the Republican cause. Sean Moran and his fellow prisoners have for three years protested their criminal status by eschewing prison uniforms. Naked in their freezing cells, they defecate on the floor and write their politics on the walls using bits of their mattresses as paintbrushes. And as they wait for the Brits to recognize their political status, they order the murder of their guards. This grim story is told with sharp wit and sharper love. Readers who manage to leave Dean’s worlds of East and West Belfast without a bitter sympathy for both sides of the grinding Ulster conflict are in dire need of heart transplants.
Not a wasted moment in this terrifying and terribly funny book.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2007
ISBN: 0-15-101253-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2006
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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