This tale of adventure on the high seas is gripping at times but generally slight and rambling.
In Catalano’s semiautobiographical novel, a young college professor sets sail through the Middle East in the 1980s.
Protagonist and narrator Joe Pisano is a college professor and yachting enthusiast, much like Catalano (Music and Literature/Pace; Clifford Brown: The Life and Art of the Legendary Jazz Trumpeter, 2000). As the novel opens, Pisano is sailing through calm waters with his friends, playing captain with histrionic panache. A self-professed romantic, his head is filled with maritime literature. One of the novels strengths is Pisano’s enthusiastic narration, which slides between self-deprecation, naïveté and hypersensitivity. Describing these early, easy sea travels, Pisano quips: “My guests, who referred to me as ‘Captain,’ seemed to enjoy my exaggerated storytelling, but they enjoyed the refreshments and swimming more than anything else.” Then Pisano gets a call to participate in a real sailing adventure: A crew circumnavigating the globe needs an extra crewmember from Cairo to Milan. Before he can quote Homer’s “wine-dark sea,” Pisano is on a plane. Once in the Middle East, he finds only disillusion: The boat is in terrible shape; fellow crewmembers, Roger and Dick, are silently disgruntled on their best days; and the sailing is a monotonous cycle of terrible weather, run-ins with bandits and hard labor. Some of the episodes, like an encounter with a dock full of treacherous-looking gunmen, live up to the standards of classic sea-faring adventure literature. Readers may wish all aspects of the novel exhibited the same attention to detail the author reserves for exploring his protagonist’s inner life. Roger and Dick are sketchily drawn, and most of Pisano’s interactions with them fail to deepen their characters; readers may long to hear their perspective, but it never comes. Catalano rarely explains boating vocabulary for the layman so boating novices will find certain parts of the novel hard to fathom. What is “the gelcoat of the freeboard” and how does a storm wreak havoc upon it? The adventure ends with a rather spectacular scene near Libya, but the novel’s overall lack of depth dulls the adventure.
This tale of adventure on the high seas is gripping at times but generally slight and rambling.Pub Date: Feb. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0615556963
Page Count: 148
Publisher: Aegeon Press
Review Posted Online: May 10, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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