“What an awful, ghastly, wicked world,” says Susie. A hyperbolic one, too.
Here’s a Caribbean murder melodrama, written by a British historian who specializes in that area.
It’s the 1980s on an invented island, 20 years after it gained independence from the British; unfortunately, the island is so generic we might be on the moon. Chamberlain uses broad strokes to paint a majority black population and a white minority of former plantation owners and indentured laborers. Two women are her alternating narrators. Vanessa Francklyn's family has lived on the island for generations, and she has inherited a sugar plantation. Susie Howard is a British expatriate, an anthropology lecturer at the university (though we never see her on campus). In her mid-30s, Vanessa marries Cammy Turner, a white man who grew up poor but is now the richest man on the island thanks to his construction business. Susie has an affair with the Afro-Caribbean David Springer, poet, novelist and calypso singer, the eponymous Mighty Jester; his anti-establishment calypsos have won him a large following. David is married to Lucinda, an artist and rising star, whose patron and lover is Cammy Turner. This is way too schematic. It’s also troubling that the narrators' voices sound the same, though the women are polar opposites. Cammy turns into an abusive husband; Vanessa, a doormat wife. David is an attentive lover but low-key and passive, not protagonist material. Cammy is shot to death as a crime wave engulfs the island. There’s a big fat clue as to the killer’s identity, squelching the suspense. Still, we climb the “ladder of escalation.” David is scapegoated, arrested, tried in secret and sentenced to death. A frantic Susie flies to England and enlists legal help. Both narrators are now close to hysteria: Vanessa’s the victim of panic attacks, Susie’s the almost-victim of a strangler.
“What an awful, ghastly, wicked world,” says Susie. A hyperbolic one, too.Pub Date: June 7, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-615-94020-5
Page Count: 318
Publisher: Dr. Cicero Books
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2014
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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