From Irish author Ryan (Glenallen, 1993 etc.), a glowering indictment of the double standard in her native land. Patricia married dense Gerry 20 years earlier, on the rebound from Paddy, her passionate love. Now financially secure and the mother of two teenagers, she is bored silly. Attempting to communicate with Gerry is frustrating, and sex is a chore. Then Paddy reappears in her life, still handsome, now successful, also married (also on the rebound). Their re-encounter ignites an affair, complete with days of wine, roses, and burgeoning doubts in Paris for Pat. Protagonist number two, Joan, toils as a lawyerunderappreciated and overworkedto support her beloved husband, painter David, who is ill and neurotically obsessed with guilt because of his brother's death in childhood. When he becomes successful, David shrugs off his dependency on Joan, who ponders, ``Her strength had been squandered, poured without reckoning into his sustaining.'' Sad, doomed Sarah (heroine number three), the mother of three with another on the way, is a textbook victim, married to a wife-beater. With the help of Joan and Pat (a former classmate), Sarah takes the first step toward freedom...but not soon enough. Eventually, Joan and David reach a new plateau of understanding while Pat, intuiting the potentially corrosive differences between Paddy's focus on the affair and her own, makes a liberating decision. As Ryan views it, the real villains here are social and judicial tolerance of abuse of women and, as always, the ego-squashing, tradition-fostered yoke of marriage in which the wife ceases to be an independent being. Her characters move fast and efficiently in the heat of this Message. An engrossing broadside in the struggle for true partnership between the sexes.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-312-13168-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1995
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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