Artlessly written albeit painless to read. Newcomer Bardi seems to want to say something about a world informed by...
A twist on the stranger-comes-to-town genre that’s long on plot and short on art, with some extra points-of-view thrown in to ensure novel-length.
Fred Brown was a prophet—and the “Fredian” cultists now all wear plain brown clothes in his honor. This is all we know about the religion of Mary Fred, a girl-cultist who has a supermodel’s bone structure behind all the, well, nothing. M.F. finds herself assigned to a foster home after two of her brothers die from curable diseases and her parents are jailed for neglect. Enter the Cullisons, a late-’90s nontraditional family comprised of spinster mother, valley girl daughter, and druggie uncle. The antics begin. True happiness, it seems, lies somewhere between a cult’s conservatism and the rampant televisionized disaster of suburbia. M.F. is soon watching the worst of daytime TV and even being sarcastic, but just as surely as she begins to change, so do the Cullisons. Before long, they eat dinner as a family unit, sister Heather becomes a productive member of society, and even Uncle Roy does his drugs “more judiciously.” But the fun can’t last forever: the “Big Cat,” a catastrophe predicted by the Fredian Bible, is just around the corner—and if that isn’t enough to rock the boat, a little violence stolen from the real world’s headlines will do the trick. The problem here is in the execution: every time a bit of momentum is established, Bardi shifts to a new first-person narrator, each less relevant than the last. We start with M.F.—so dubbed by hip Heather—and move on through the family. By the time we return to the main character—after a number of tedious, abject subplots—it’s too little, too late.
Artlessly written albeit painless to read. Newcomer Bardi seems to want to say something about a world informed by television, but the story itself is so dependent on television that the strategy founders.Pub Date: Sept. 11, 2001
ISBN: 0-7434-1193-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Washington Square/Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2001
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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