Cohen plods along the Austen road map, but the characters lack wit; they’re more often pathetic or mean than funny.
Cohen, whose contemporary version of Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen in Boca, 2002) was a delight, now tackles Persuasion in this strained romance about a high-school guidance counselor and the man she reluctantly threw over 13 years before.
Anne Ehrlich met Ben Cutler when she was a senior at Columbia and he was a bookish travel agent from Queens. Though deeply in love, she broke up with him because her family, rich Westchester Jews of German descent, didn’t approve of his plebeian background and lack of obvious prospects. Now she’s a 34-year-old unmarried guidance counselor at a Scarsdale, N.Y., high school, where she helps students apply to college. Cohen offers astute social commentary on the college admissions process, specifically the wooing strategies that occur between high-school seniors and the colleges of their choice. Anne’s family is now financially strapped because her father has run through the family fortune he inherited from Anne’s mother, who died when Anne was very young. To pay her father’s debts, Anne is trying to sell the large but increasingly rundown family home in which she was raised by her maternal grandmother, Winnie, a crotchety but lovable grandame whose disapproval of Ben influenced Anne. Out of the blue, a certain Jonathan Cutler transfers to the school; he has been living abroad with his single mother and his Uncle Ben, now a famous travel-book author. Although Ben is engaged to his Danish assistant, a pleasant woman named Kirsten, and despite some slight diversions with Anne’s other suitors, there is little question where things are headed.
Cohen plods along the Austen road map, but the characters lack wit; they’re more often pathetic or mean than funny.Pub Date: April 4, 2006
ISBN: 0-312-32502-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
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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