Though you can occasionally see the pulp SF guy lurking behind the narrative’s stoic face here, this is definitely more...
The world as it should be—according to the late Heinlein (d. 1988).
It’s a rare lost manuscript that’s published with a critical introduction, but this is exactly what happened with For Us, The Living, the newly uncovered first novel from SF master Heinlein. Spider Robinson’s intro gives a pretty honest evaluation of the book, refraining from the usual urge to proclaim it a lost masterpiece of an ineffable kind. Spider is right: this isn’t really a novel, and anyone expecting something along the lines of Starship Troopers, The Puppet Masters, or even one of the author’s later think-pieces like Stranger in a Strange Land, would do well to steer clear. For Us is really a bundle of lectures on the world situation and ways it could be improved, from the viewpoint of Perry Nelson, who has an accident in 1939 and wakes up in 2086. It’s Perry’s good luck that he’s rescued by Diana, a dancer who tends to walk about in the nude and thinks Perry is just peachy. Also fortunate for Perry is that everybody he runs across finds it hardly strange at all that he’s arrived from some 150 years in the past; instead, people just want to treat him to free lectures on all the history and changes in government, world affairs, and economics he’s missed over that time. In this sense, For Us isn’t really so much a novel as a treatise on utopian society, similar to Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward.
Though you can occasionally see the pulp SF guy lurking behind the narrative’s stoic face here, this is definitely more academic exercise than worthy fiction.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-7432-5998-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2003
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
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