Let's put the cards on the table and confess that it was with something of relief that I accepted O Shepherd, Speak! as the end of Lanny Budd, and that his "return" was unwelcome news. After reading the new book, it seems still a mistake. The magic of the earlier heroic saga has vanished. The machinery creaks a bit, and if anything as much in the headlines could be said to date, this dates. The story revolves around the threat of the Russian propaganda war, into which Lanny is drawn from the island of the peace movement he had chosen. Once again he is sent to trouble spots,- Germany, both West and East, and Poland. Old figures, familiar to his followers, reappear,- Monck, Kurt Meissner (and his troubled son, Fritz), Lanny's sister Bess, now an ardent Communist, and her husband, Hansi, who eventually is enlisted to act in counter-intelligence, some of Lanny's old contacts in the world of art, now reduced to beggardom, and so on. The search for the basic sources of counterfeit money provides the immediate issues, but- as always- this branches out into many fields of counterespionage and there's the climax in Lanny's imprisonment and torture and escape. Once again the reader has a sense of being in the midst of recent history behind the headlines. But somehow, the plot seems synthetic, the development contrived, and the injection of modern socialism and a new approach to the peace movement arbitrary.
Pub Date: April 20, 1953
ISBN: 1931313113
Page Count: 306
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: April 11, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1953
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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