In his first collection of short stories, award-winning journalist Sternberg writes with unsentimental understanding about working-class life in Connecticut. These ten stories evoke a world filled with good, hard-working people who merely get by and teenagers doomed to repeat the failures of their parents. The factories have been closed, so there is little work, and the work that can be found is purposeless and degrading. In ``Airport Beach,'' Zanske the school attendance officer continues to pursue persistent truants although he knows it does no good; and in ``Moose,'' Bruce Barmusch is shot while attempting to fine someone for illegally dumping garbage. Both Zanske and Barmusch find joy in unusual occurrences, even pedestrian ones, that break the monotony of their routine. Bill Stankowski derives his pleasure from avoiding disaster, as he narrowly does in ``Splat,'' and in keeping his family together, while in ``Bilt-Rite,'' Ralph Correggio can't manage to hold his extended family of employees together when he is forced to close his construction business. If the adults are all slightly disappointed, the teenagers in the book have adopted that disappointment, in addition to being typically self-destructive: In ``Blazer,'' Rudy D`Angelo watches his best friend, golden boy Jeff Fontaine, literally self-combust. Although his characters are victims of circumstance, Sternberg also points out that the circumstances are often of their own making. In ``Teena,'' a 14- year-old girl has learned all about birth control but won't ask her 28-year-old boyfriend to use condoms; in the title story, although Brunet's Camaro is the 56th stolen since January (in a town with a population of 60,000), he will not consider buying another kind of car. While Sternberg makes no attempt to justify his protagonists' behavior, he does not make it seem ridiculous, and the reader leaves with a better understanding of a sadder world. Simple and affecting. Sternberg proves that ordinary people can have extraordinary characters. (First serial to the New Yorker)
Pub Date: July 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-15-115373-6
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1994
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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