From the author of The Three Passions of Countess Natalya (1985), an affecting account of how a young British aviator from the wrong side of the social tracks goes about surviving the last year of WW I. Not yet 21, Marten Corby has served for two years as an infantryman on the Western Front and survived seven months of aerial combat. Sustained by alcohol, memories of an unattainable girl back home, and an eerie ability to detach himself from his horrific environment, the airman keeps his comrades in arms at a distance. The only son of a working-class family from inner-city London, Marten is serving with Peter West, a golden boy who befriended him at the public school to which he won a scholarship. Even so, Marten (once wounded and decorated for valor in the trenches) refuses to fully renew the acquaintance for unacknowledged fear of further loss. Moreover, while among his squadron's best fliers, he does little more than duty requires, shooting at German aircraft only when fellow pilots are at risk. Invalided back to England after a crash landing, Marten learns that Mary, the lass he loved from afar, has betrayed Peter, who expected to marry her. Distraught, Marten finds solace in the arms of Jean Stacey, a worldly woman four years his senior. Marten returns to France in appreciably better spirits; the once alienated airman is also readier to assume responsibility. When Peter is killed at the height of a last-gasp German offensive, he's prepared to bear even heavier burdens. At the close, a renewed Marten is shepherding a flock of greenhorns back to base from a turning-point battle, confident he will live to return home and to marry Jean. A well-handled coming-of-age tale that offers a rather less glamorous view of the Great War's pioneering fighter pilots than legend allows.
Pub Date: May 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-7867-0409-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1997
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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