Despite engaging moments, Simon’s didactic tone strains readers’ patience.
Outrage against a mental-health system no longer in service is the guiding force in this pointedly uplifting love story from novelist and memoirist Simon (Riding the Bus with My Sister, 2002, which became a Hallmark Hall of Fame movie) about a deaf African-American man and a mentally disabled woman who meet in a Dickensian mental institution in the 1960s and overcome all obstacles through force of will and spiritual goodness.
In 1968, childless retired schoolteacher Martha briefly gives shelter to Lynnie and Homan, runaways from the residential facility in northern Pennsylvania, until the corrupt head doctor and his henchmen track them down. Homan gets away. Lynnie is taken back in a straightjacket, but the authorities don’t know about her newborn baby, delivered by Homan but the product of a rape. Keeping her promise to Lynnie, Martha hides infant Julia with the help of various former students and eventually raises her as her own granddaughter. Over the next four decades, Homan never ceases to long for Lynnie and the baby. Deaf since a childhood fever, he uses his street smarts, spiritual wisdom and mechanical skills to survive a picaresque series of adventures until he lands in California, where he more than prospers. Meanwhile, Lynnie remains in what she calls “the bad place,” where she was placed as a child by a middle-class parent embarrassed at her lack of cognitive skills. Fortunately, saintly staff member Alice helps Lynnie develop her artistic talent and keeps track of Julia through one of Martha’s students. The publication of an exposé on “the bad place” changes conditions in the late '70s. Gradually Lynnie learns to talk. She reunites with her beloved older sister Hannah, who sells Lynnie’s art in the gallery she runs. Now living independently, Lynnie still longs for Homan and Julia. The question is not if but how they will unite (and why resourceful Homan takes so long).
Despite engaging moments, Simon’s didactic tone strains readers’ patience.Pub Date: May 4, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-446-57446-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: April 11, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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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