Yarbrough fulfills the novelist's chief task, by giving weight and import to human actions.
Yarbrough returns to Loring, Miss.
Loring, circa 1902, was the setting for the author’s Visible Spirits (2001); and 1943 for his Prisoners of War (2004). Now he chronicles the present-day residents of Loring, most notably Pete Barrington, former high-school football hero and a physician, who has returned with his wife and family to the town of his youth after sexual misconduct with a patient ended his California practice. Pete's physique and magnetism amount to a troubled destiny. As a teenager, he was seduced by Maggie Depoyster, the mother of a shy, devout schoolmate. As an adult, Pete ruefully reflects that “he felt as if . . . some force, like gravity, drew others toward him. Once they entered his orbit, their navigational systems went haywire.” Now, Maggie's son Alan, a deacon at his church and manager of a grocery store, still blames Pete for destroying his family, a resentment fed by Pete's popularity and superiority in sports. This grudge has lasting, tragic consequences for both families, particularly because Alan's son Mason, a kindly boy, is the first to approach Pete's daughter Toni at her new school, and the two have become friends. The dialogue here sometimes reflects the novelist's voice too obviously. It's hard to imagine anyone saying, as Pete does, “The rarity of the circus combined with the smallness of the town to make its presence here a thing of wonder.” But if a few phrases are overly purple, much rings true, particularly the lifelike, easy, but inexorable way events unfold. The momentum that builds, the increasing power the characters have to do each other good or ill, holds the reader spellbound. In the character of Alan, there is a particularly moving portrait of a person of faith, which makes the one shocking crime he commits all the more resonant.
Yarbrough fulfills the novelist's chief task, by giving weight and import to human actions.Pub Date: June 9, 2006
ISBN: 1-4000-4438-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2006
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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