A debut novel that's skimpy on plot but abundant in humor and plain truththe necessary ingredients in a blue-collar single mom's own recipe for survival. Gabby Fulbriten lives with her three children in the last house on the road to the dump in Leadbelly, Vermont. She works part-time in a grocery store and occupies herself at home by piecing quilts together, listening to Shakespeare plays on cassette, and contemplating the human condition, especially the condition of being an overweight, unmarried mother who's hoping for the right man to come rescue her from life by the dump. Not that Gabby suffers any real illusions about men. She's lived with a couple of them and watched each one go off and leave her with squalling babies, a sick old dog, and plumbing bills she can't pay. Now the men in her life tend to be garbage collectors or bill collectors or Mormon missionaries seeking to convert her. But Gabby never succumbs to self-pity. She puts everything into perspective by inventing mock recipes using the ingredients of her own liferecipes for things like Families on the Half Shell or Wieners 'n' Rage. Stone's writing is wonderful, blunt, and assured, and her Vermont setting, complete with plain-spoken neighbors, dump trucks speeding by, and cows mating in the next field, is fully evoked and believable as is Gabby herself. Finally, though, we wish for something more heresome turn of plot, some hint of change. Recipes are fine, but cooks know that what everybody clamors for is the finished productat some point you have to light a fire and let things fry. Funny and true, good and wry, but needs stirring. (First printing of 35,000; author tour)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-393-03854-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1995
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
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