If Lipsett's previous books, Out of Danger (1987) and Coming Back Up (1985), were soft-focus looks at personal tragedy, this time she has taken care to use a more powerful lens—and the snapshots she hands us are not exactly pretty pictures. The book opens with the story of Nancy Jacobs, a young mother who's taken herself to a clinic in Mexico in 1950 to see if anything can be done about her cancer, which the doctors have pronounced to be fatal. Left at home, in California, are her considerably older husband, Maury, and their four young children. In the brief glimpse we get of her, Nancy seems to be life- affirming, passionate, and mostly well-intentioned. Surprisingly, then, the ghost she leaves behind is anything but beneficent. As we follow the next chapters in her family's life, it turns out that Nancy's legacy to them is generally unremitting—and sometimes unendurable—pain. Lernie Jacobs, the oldest daughter, grows up to be plump, artistic, and withdrawn. At age 16, already hooked on Librium for her nerves and Dexedrine for her weight problem, she suffers a blow from unrequited love and swallows a couple of her father's sleeping pills. The result is another tragedy to add to the family toll. Jeff Jacobs, the youngest child, was just learning to talk when his mother died. At age ten, after Lernie's death, he stops speaking altogether. For Maury, Nancy's ghost is restless and ever-present, isolating him and preventing him from forming new bonds-even with Iris, the practical widow who loves him and sees him as the salvation for her own deep, secret loneliness. There are moments of sharp-edged humor here and many moments of epiphany. But what Lipsett spotlights are moments of such pure suffering that, overall, her beam feels merciless—it reveals more than we ever wanted to know.
Pub Date: May 8, 1991
ISBN: 0-916515-98-2
Page Count: 143
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1991
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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