A touching, philosophical meditation on the psychological fallout from war.
This novel, a poignant mediation on the emotional wages of war, captures the suffering felt by veterans and the people who love them.
Set in the early 1990s, Eliot’s (Tanaki on the Shore,2006) deftly told novel is haunted by war and geopolitical tumult. The Berlin Wall crumbled, the Cold War recently sped to a sudden conclusion, Nelson Mandela has finally tasted freedom and the U.S. military is poised for a massive invasion of Iraq. Marjorie Llewellyn, a therapist at the Capitol Center for Psychic Wellness in Washington, D.C., spends her life in the thicket of trauma war has produced. She often counsels Vietnam veterans roiled by unpleasant remembrances of combat. She also suffers from the effects war has had and may still have on her life: Her father, a veteran, died prematurely, and it looks increasingly likely her younger brother will be deployed for Desert Shield. Everything changes when she’s assigned a new patient at the clinic, Gary Devers, who frustrates her with his cryptic “intellectualizing of trauma” but also compels her to reflect more profoundly on her own nagging sense of loss. “When Gary was here it began to make sense,” she says. “I could feel that stone of my father glowing warmer when we were together. It was as if there were a stone in him that glowed with a similar warmth, and the two stones were happy when they were together.” The entire narrative is couched within a meta-narrative of the book’s publication: Marjorie’s son, Arturo, sends the 15-year-old manuscript to a literary agent who immediately senses its artistic merit. The prose often strikes a poetic note, highlighting an intelligent treatment of grief. Marjorie eventually falls for Gary—an illicit romance that leads to her departure from the clinic—and their relationship flowers from a professional one into an intensely personal connection. The intriguingly complex plot includes tangled mysteries as subplots: a former patient of Marjorie’s goes missing, and Gary’s status as a war veteran comes under suspicion.
A touching, philosophical meditation on the psychological fallout from war.Pub Date: Oct. 30, 2013
ISBN: 978-1483946870
Page Count: 348
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2014
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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