Despite his gift for telling detail, rueful but compassionate insight and effortless imagery, Galanes's second effort...
Domestic diva, possibly patterned after actual ex-con celebrity, finds redemption through helping others.
Recently released from Federal prison after doing time for income-tax evasion, Emma Sutton is almost back on her game. Again making frequent appearances on Oprah as a decorating and cuisine consultant, she scours auction houses for the latest in luxe. Spying a Nakashima table perfect for her Park Avenue Xanadu, Emma orders her weekend assistant, moonlighting PS 431 social worker Benjamin, to bid on it for her. His weekday job poses thornier challenges: Obese third-grader Gracie is being picked on by playground bullies but refuses to turn them in. Benjamin finds Gracie’s svelte single mom alluring but suspects Tina may be deliberately dosing her daughter with junk food, although she insists that Gracie is on a strict diet. Meanwhile, Emma’s ex-husband Bobby has returned to her as mysteriously as he walked out decades before. However, across Central Park from her digs, Bobby keeps a secret pied-à-terre in which he squirrels away furniture and paintings Emma long ago banished as unstylish. Their daughter Cassy, desultory heiress-apparent to Mom’s enterprises, spends her nights clubbing and drugging, often waking up in strange ménages à trois. The adult principals seem to have all been sabotaged by parents who range from hypercritical (Emma’s father) to dismissive (Cassy’s father). Answering Benjamin’s cell phone when Tina calls to protest his allegations of child abuse, Emma decides to take Gracie’s weight problem in hand as only a famous lifestyle maven can.
Despite his gift for telling detail, rueful but compassionate insight and effortless imagery, Galanes's second effort Father’s Day (2004) falls flat; the resolution is simply too hurried and uncomplicated.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-06-155383-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2008
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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