A lovely deliverance of a debut, the writing quietly sure, the course of true love meandering through its pages, as untidy...
Though tethered to the rude vicissitudes of everyday life, this fine, sly first novel also boasts a sweet, intoxicating buffer of magic and apocalypse.
The story opens with Buddy, a made-for-TV wrestler, on the skids and headed for the edge. Our boy is just barely keeping it together with pills and beer and memories. Four years ago, Buddy’s wife Alix left him, taking his much-loved daughter to go live with the director of a movie company that had come to their hometown, Wilmington, North Carolina. Since then, Buddy has gone from wrestling hero to fall guy. Deliberately losing hundreds of bouts in a row suitably reflects his rather crummy life and his oddball company of friends. Connelly draws this sidewise and impermanent world with a lighter-than-air hand, delineating a fragile existence shattered when a loony fan from the dark side of professional show wrestling shoots Buddy and a number of his ring cohorts. As Buddy seeks recovery, redemption, and reunion, Connelly keeps the action off-kilter. Buddy will meet his double, who tenders sound advice on more than one occasion; there will be a miracle (right out of Amal and the Night Visitors); one of Buddy’s homeless chums will discover the beauty of Svobodian utopianism; Buddy will fake amnesia in a ruse to win back his wife. The nimble prose has plenty of momentum; this is a story of winning back love, and readers will be pulling for Buddy. The plot backdrop—a Texas-sized asteroid headed toward Mother Earth—is, believe it or not, unobtrusive: Connelly’s magicalism is modest enough to register without a blink, and the apocalypse is more aura than menace, trivial in comparison to the cataclysm that is Buddy’s daily grind.
A lovely deliverance of a debut, the writing quietly sure, the course of true love meandering through its pages, as untidy as a construction site.Pub Date: July 5, 2004
ISBN: 0-7432-4664-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2004
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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