Well-meaning, well-written and well-plotted, with qualified justice for some of the bad guys and hope for a few of the...
Playwright/activist Nussbaum makes her fiction debut with a scathing look at life inside an institution for disabled juveniles.
Located next to the old Chicago stockyards, the Illinois Learning and Life Skills Center is hardly as nurturing as its name suggests. Formerly state-run, ILLC is now operated by a private company whose main interest is in maximizing profits; while Whitney-Palm cuts costs and corners, ILLC’s doctors get kickbacks for ordering millions of dollars in unnecessary tests for their patients. One of the “houseparents” is sexually abusing a terrified incest survivor; one of the guards is a brutal bully who eventually breaks a boy’s jaw. Even the well-meaning employees are so exhausted and overstretched due to staff cuts that one wheelchair-bound kid dies of third-degree burns from a scalding shower when left unsupervised. Nussbaum unfolds her story in a polyphonic narrative whose colorful individual voices somewhat mitigate the parade of grim particulars. Tough yet vulnerable Yessenia is a particularly engaging narrator among the residents, and gentle, caring guard Ricky has a touching romance with Joanne, a disabled activist who does clerical work at ILLC and serves as the novel’s political conscience. Nussbaum doesn’t deal in shades of gray: Whitney-Palm donates big bucks to Republicans and Democrats alike to make sure its misdeeds go unpunished, and odious VP Tim denies workers raises while enjoying his sailboat and house in Florida. Since the author herself works with disabled teens, these all-black villains may well be based on fact, but they make for slightly schematic fiction. Nonetheless, Nussbaum’s vivid portraits of a wide variety of ILLC residents, some of whom are mentally ill as well as physically challenged, reveal the three-dimensional humanity of people the rest of society is all too willing to neglect and ignore.
Well-meaning, well-written and well-plotted, with qualified justice for some of the bad guys and hope for a few of the oppressed: A most appropriate winner of the 2012 PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction.Pub Date: May 28, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-61620-263-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: March 10, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2013
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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