A master of high-concept fiction (Fashionably Late, 1994, etc.) returns with a likely bestseller about writing a bestseller— a meaty send-up of publishing told with intelligence, wit, and shameless enthusiasm. Goldsmith claims Rona Jaffe territory with the cross-cut stories of five writers whose novels appear on the fall list of Davis & Dash, a floundering Manhattan publishing house. Susan Baker Edmonds, 63, once a legal secretary in Cincinnati, has been a bestselling romance writer for decades. In an author tour from hell (42 cities in six weeks), she battles to boost her circulation. The Cinderella figure is Camilla Clapfish, 29, a poor-but-virtuous British tour guide who fights loneliness by writing a gentle book about middle-aged women on a bus trip through Italy. In upstate New York, meanwhile, Judith and Daniel Gross collaborate on a commercial venture about a mother who kills her children. Judith will write, Daniel will edit and sell. But Daniel gets greedy and claims sole authorship. The lone male author is Gerald Ochs Davis, Jr. (monogram GOD), the Michael Korda-esque publisher of Davis & Dash who supports three wives and a mistress with his bestsellers. Finally, there's Bloomington, Indiana, librarian Opal O'Neal, in town to sell the 1,114-page manuscript written by her daughter Terry, who, after her 27th rejection letter, hanged herself. Along with a ton of old gossip and dropped names (including ``the pricks at Kirkus''), Goldsmith melds her tale with a user's guide to publishing (``Now was not the time to think about Alf and his disloyalty, her daughter's wasted life. . . . Now only remember that half of all mass market paperbacks sold were romances—almost a billion dollars in annual sales''). Despite some lapses in dramatic tension, a bright and entertaining education in bookmaking where the good get bestsellers and the bad never eat in the Grill Room again. ($175,000 ad/promo; film rights to Paramount; author tour; radio satellite tour)
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-06-017822-1
Page Count: 528
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1996
PERSPECTIVES
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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