Parker does a fine job exploring Joel’s pain, but the overworked music/love connection is not enough to give his story...
Soul music acts as a lifeline for a tormented adolescent whose family is disintegrating.
Three things about this very short novel hit you immediately. The first is the voice of the narrator, 14-year-old Joel Junior; the second is the invocation of America’s rhythm-and-blues singers; and the third is the terrible plight of Joel and his little brothers, Carter and Tank. For his fifth work of fiction, Parker (Towns Without Rivers, 2001, etc.) takes us back to Trent, North Carolina. Joel’s daddy is not right in the head. When he’s having one of his spells, he hears voices; he has destroyed the TV with his golf clubs, though he hasn’t (yet) laid a hand on his kids. Joel’s mama was the first to jump ship, followed by her firstborn, Angela. Now Joel is father and mother to both his kid brothers. He expresses perfectly his lost Southern self, as he tries to make sense of the inexplicable. What sustains this beaten-down white boy is his love of the great black soul singers, a taste he has inherited from his father, who has just broken down again. Fearing the worst, Joel bundles his brothers into the pickup, but Carter gets loose; their daddy ties him up and cuts his hair, snipping off an earlobe. Joel has seen enough; he drives Tank and himself to the coastal town where Angela is waiting tables, but she’s a tough cookie and disinclined to help. After failing to track down their mother, Joel and Tank return home to a catastrophe. That’s not much storyline in a novel that is all about love: love promised, love withheld, love struggling against the odds.
Parker does a fine job exploring Joel’s pain, but the overworked music/love connection is not enough to give his story ballast.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2005
ISBN: 1-56512-484-7
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
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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