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THE HOTEL IN THE JUNGLE

The beautifully evoked jungles of southern Mexico are the setting for distinguished critic Guerard's eighth novel (Christine/Annette, 1985, etc.), a story that layers diaries and narratives from three separate time periods—1870, 1922, and the present—to tell of a fabulous Mayan ruin, Casas Grandes, and its nearby dopplegÑnger, a folly in the jungle called the Gran Hotel Balneario Chimalapa. Beginning in 1982 with the arrival of Tulane graduate student Eloise Deslonde, who is tracing the movements of the 19th-century adventuress Rosellen Maurepas for her thesis, ``The Liberated Woman in Antebellum and Postbellum New Orleans,'' the book plunges us into a world of interlocking stories of time-warped passions. We follow Rosellen from her first glimpse, as a teenager, of the dashing mercenary William Walker to her later attempt, in 1870, to determine once and for all whether Walker really died at the hands of a firing squad—or escaped to Casas Grandes. Charles Stanfield, a 20-year-old engineer, accompanies the bewitching Rosellen on her search. Hired to survey the site for a canal linking the Atlantic and the Pacific, Stanfield, instead of doing his job, falls into an idyll with Marita, an Indian girl, while Rosellen disappears among the haunted pyramids. Fifty years later, in 1922, Stanfield will return to the scene, drawn by advertisements for a 45-round bout featuring Jack Johnson, the dethroned black boxer. There, he will pass time with the boxer and his absurd retinue, including the erotic adventuress Monica Swift (based on the feminist poet Mina Loy). There, too, like Rosellen before him, he will disappear. And many years later, Eloise, busy unraveling the record of these lives, will almost vanish as well. For lovers of Mexico, then, a speculative biography of a place where, by paths only a novelist can reimagine, the figures of quite different epochs intersect and interact. At times bewildering and overly dense—like the jungle it evokes—and, in the end, much like the Grand Hotel Balneario itself: haunted, mysterious, beguiling.

Pub Date: June 1, 1996

ISBN: 1-880909-45-6

Page Count: 390

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1996

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THE CATCHER IN THE RYE

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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MAGIC HOUR

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

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