An addictive storyline that pulls at the reader’s social conscience and sense of justice, delivered in an honest, humane...
A white woman saves a family of South African orphans from those who would prey upon them.
Opening with a chase and a violent thunderstorm, Tucker’s novel immediately grabs the reader’s attention. Ida Morgan rescues a young child from a storm-swollen river and, in helping the girl, inadvertently places herself in varying degrees of danger. Leaving the gated safety of her compound, she ventures away from the city and into the extreme squalor where the orphan and her siblings live in an abandoned dwelling. Along the way, Ida dodges a riot of drunken young men who throw rocks at cars and beat anyone unlucky enough to cross their path (they beat Ida’s hired hand and leave him for dead). She encounters children so hungry they pick dry porridge from the ground because there is nothing else to eat, finds a child who is ill due to a lack of sanitized drinking water and helps the children escape an organized ring of men who rape children in the belief that children will not pass along the AIDS virus. As Ida brings the children back to her home, she has encounters with the local police, who seem to care little for her plight in dealing with the children, and a social system so burdened with orphans infected with AIDS that it is almost paralyzed. Throughout most the novel, the Christian element is subtle to the point of seeming almost nonexistent, but it becomes more pronounced as the story progresses and the reader learns of a tragic personal connection between Ida and one of the men arrested for beating her hired hand. Additionally, a subplot involving an abusive, racist neighbor brings depth and crushing reality to a work already laden with trauma. Glimpses of culture and language throughout keep the novel feeling like the recounting of a situation with which the author is familiar.
An addictive storyline that pulls at the reader’s social conscience and sense of justice, delivered in an honest, humane manner.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0982277690
Page Count: 184
Publisher: Athanatos
Review Posted Online: Aug. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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