It's back to San Francisco and the genteel, graceful life—undermined this time by dark desire and disease—for the prolific Adams (A Southern Exposure, 1995, etc.), whose tenth novel is a virtual catalogue of physicians' moral flaws. Cock-of-the-walk Dr. Raleigh Sanderson, the city's preeminent heart surgeon, thinks nothing of ignoring his grandchildren, keeping a beautiful mistress, and boffing nurses as necessary to relieve his post-op erections; big-toothed Dr. Dave Jacobs, a widower, believes in total domination of the woman he's with; Dr. Mark Stiner, after driving his long-suffering wife to drink (as Dr. Sanderson has), takes up with a colleague. But the focus isn't really on these manly specimens, or even on their spouses, but instead on a couple of women, Molly and Felicia, best friends who have the great shared misfortune of being involved with medicine's finest. For Molly, divorced and widowed, the connection with Dr. Dave begins just as she falls ill, and her dependence on him grows when it's discovered that she has a golfball-sized tumor in her sinuses. He soon comes to dominate her every moment, until by skipping out on her last radiation treatment (and on Dr. Dave), she reasserts control of her life. Felicia, Dr. Raleigh's mistress, is utterly infatuated with the surgeon for a time, but when he hits her for stepping out on him she drops him cold. He stalks her, creeping nightly around her house, until he is foiled finally by her new man. Woven among with these two primary relationships are a host of lesser connections, of ex-wives to former husbands or lovers, brothers to others, creating an intimacy that often seems to flirt with the incestuous. But this is Adams's stock in trade, and her skill at sustaining an entre-nous point of view remains superb, leaving the reader flattered by the author's confidence, if a little uncertain as to her aims.
Pub Date: April 15, 1997
ISBN: 0517269309
Page Count: -
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: March 15, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1997
PERSPECTIVES
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
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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