The liberal-minded daughter of American upper-middle-class conservative parents experiences heartache and disillusionment during the Vietnam War era as she moves along a tumultuous course put into motion after she meets and falls in love with a handsome young Frenchman.
In her debut novel, Schiffman brings Joanna Bruckner, about to start her freshman year of college, together with Lucien, who is traveling around the United States playing guitar and making money on street corners. Lucien makes a move on Joanna when he notices she is reading the French-language version of Albert Camus’ The Stranger. In an attempt to establish the pair’s commonality, Schiffman introduces their exchange of French phrases into the text. But the author also strongly implies that the relationship is most likely doomed, which undercuts the tension and suspense; their first evening together, Joanna tells Lucien she believes in free will to make life-altering choices while Lucien responds that he believes in predestination. After separations and painful self-acknowledgment about the nature of their relationship, Joanna becomes involved in an affair with a student of Zen, but ultimately finds no love or consolation with him. She feels she does not have the love of her father, from whom she so greatly desires it. This is brought out in Joanna’s thoughts early in the book, and Lucien says that very thing to her when he makes it clear that she is not the woman who rocks his world the most, even after she surprises him by showing up and staying with him in his hometown of Strasbourg. Joanna comes to a decision about the true meaning of love after a letter bomb—planted in her father’s office because his company produced Agent Orange—seriously injures him. This book, whose evenly paced and well-written action is, however, to a great extent predictable, will take college-educated middle Baby Boomers on a nostalgic trip back to the “crazy Asian war” years of drugs and demonstrations. Schiffman’s colorful descriptions of hippie culture, living spaces and nature evoke images so vivid that the reader will easily see and feel them. A vividly described, if predictable, exploration of an intense era of American history.
Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2011
ISBN: 978-1460908464
Page Count: 245
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 24, 2012
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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