O’Neal has compiled e-mail dispatches that chronicle his year spent teaching English in Beijing, China.
Children grown, debts paid and fed up with public-school teaching by bureaucracy, O’Neal headed to China in 2009. Friends and family were kept abreast of his adventures and misadventures via e-mail and he reproduces those e-mails in this substantial text. At their best, these e-mails effectively capture daily life in China’s capital city—the sights, sounds and smells; the inconveniences and shortages encountered in what remains a poor nation; and, most of all, the people, both chance encounters and evolving friendships. But coming in at a hefty 727 pages, the book is simply too long. E-mails are e-mails, and in unedited form, as they seem to be here, they too often contain mundane, unreflective musings and easy quips. Daily weather reports, updates on workouts at the gym, the frequency and amount of beer consumption and more become wearying after a couple hundred pages. Still, O’Neal is a gifted and moving writer, and like a fidgety child he eventually settles down—albeit some 400 hundred pages in—becoming less flippant and more thoughtful in his writing. He can be as insightful and precise as one will find in the best travel writing, whether that be simply observing the variety of faces on a crowded bus, noting the everyday, lovely activities and interactions within Beijing’s crowded hutongs (alley ways), discovering with wonder a group of petrified trees on a walk around campus and playfully interacting in a park with a man and his trained birds. Also, he can be irreverently funny: one woman was possessed of “a smile that would stop a tank headed for Tianan’men square.” But the wisecracks grow old, and one waits for O’Neal’s serious writing to come once more. It invariably does, but after too much banter about buses, bikes and beer. An intermittently engaging and enlightening tale of China by a writer with promise, but in need of a severe edit.
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1463660987
Page Count: 727
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 3, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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