Well-written, but the contrivances and bloodless tone make for less-than-compelling reading.
Novelist Ferris (The Misconceiver, 1997, etc.), now winner of Mid-List’s First Series Award for Short Fiction, offers 12 tales of love, loss, infidelity, and (last but not least) postgrad anomie.
One: An artificial-intelligence expert meets his former lover at a conference and wastes no time bedding her again. She cheats on her husband without a qualm—after all, he's in Japan. Two: Psychotherapist Elissa is used to her irresponsible spouse's frequent absences. He's conveniently out of town when she runs into a former flame, Sandy, whom she remembers as a “tall blond hippie god.” She has a score to settle: Does Sandy remember the long-ago night of the wild pig stampede when everybody got so stoned and he forced her to fellate him? Uh, no, he doesn't. Three: an orthopedist regrets his inability to save a little boy who died while joy-riding on the back of a fire truck. Four: a gay substitute teacher takes more responsibility than he should for a troubled kid from the projects. Five: a middle-aged university English teacher and administrator is torn between her sense of obligation to her grown, gay, HIV-positive son and to her lover, who wants to conceive a last-chance baby with her. Six: a village fireman and jack-of-all-trades finds out that a friend has been accused of molesting and raping more than one of the foster children he and his wife took in over the years. So what? He's acquitted on a technicality. Seven: southern California losers with empty lives and negative attitudes hit the endless freeway and screw around when the mood takes them. Eight: a young woman muses sadly on the sins of men in general and her thoughtless lover in particular before she aborts an unwanted pregnancy with toxic herbs. Nine: a professor of journalism at a small southern college finds comfort in her preschool children, despite her arrogant husband's neglect. And there are three more, in a similarly depressing vein.
Well-written, but the contrivances and bloodless tone make for less-than-compelling reading.Pub Date: June 15, 2001
ISBN: 0-922811-50-4
Page Count: 176
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2001
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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