First-time novelist Stein tells the surprisingly appealing story of a teenager living through the complexity of a premature adulthood. Comparisons between Stein's narrator, 16-year-old Will Sterling, and the immortal Holden Caulfield are inescapableWill wisecracks his way through his strengths, weaknesses, and myriad adolescent confusionsbut the kid also owes something to Joyce's Stephen Dedalus. In place of aesthetics and the loss of faith, Will has math and suburban New Jersey: He's obsessed with probability, doesn't exactly make fast time with the chicks, hangs out with an older married couple and their kids, and suffers his mother's endless stream of desperation dates. ``I came to understand one basic law of probability that I had missed: we are prepared for the last thing that happened and not what's next,'' Will comments after aspects of his stable world begin to get twisted. His older friends, Terri and Shep Kean, split up, and he drifts into an awkward yet instructive sexual relationship with Sara, the only woman in his life who is roughly his age. Sara has a boyfriend, so scenes of her groping and petting with Will carry a certain illicit charge, but Stein presents their initiation in a thoroughly off-kilter manner, spicing the youthful seduction with oddball banter. In Sara, Will has met his matchso much so that you want the two of them to endure into their late 20s rather then pass through the inevitable breakup. Not that Sara is Will's only concern; the novel provides plentiful side excursions from its swift and skillfully compressed plot: basketball, driving to New York, the deaths of fathers, hanging out with black guys, and the usual trials of high schoolall are captured in Stein's adeptly woven fictional net. In other hands, this could have emerged as just another tale of an irritatingly precocious child hero. From Stein, though, the result is an absolute charmer with a spry and sarcastic edge.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1995
ISBN: 1-877946-57-5
Page Count: 172
Publisher: Permanent Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1995
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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