A sometimes clever, sometimes ponderous montage.
A Canadian documentary filmmaker traces her Anglo-Indian heritage back to a jail cell in Pune.
Claire Spencer, 38, knows little of her father’s extended family beyond a few loose facts and one tantalizing clue. In the years before Indian independence, her grandfather, an Anglo-Indian civil servant, was Gandhi’s jailer. This story has always intrigued her, and in the years following her grandfather’s death, she decides to use it as the subject for her second film. She also hopes to make peace with the ghost of her father, an aloof, authoritarian figure from whom she’s often felt estranged. But as she begins her research, Claire is presented with an even more immediate reason to trace her family history: she discovers she has a rare, perhaps genetic heart disease that causes violent palpitations and seizures. Could the life and mysterious death of her grandmother Alice hold some clue to her illness? Claire’s hope to make some sense of her father’s homeland soon becomes an attempt to understand the erratic patterns of her own psyche and body. Miller’s narrative is equally erratic as it imitates the form of the film that Claire will eventually piece together by jumping, cutting and looping in time. Between sequences of Claire and her boyfriend, David, discussing terms like “distanciation” and “jouissance” in 21st-century Toronto, the story leaps back 70 years and over a hemisphere to follow Alice and Denzil, Claire’s grandparents, on tiger hunts and across deserts in the years leading up to Indian independence. In addition, Miller offers dream sequences, snippets of film script, digressions into second-person narrative and mystically unexplained interjections by the oracular voice of Nur, a 16th-century Mughal empress. The material is rich—at times too rich: Miller’s debut is occasionally engrossing, but overburdened rather than illuminated by its own structural play.
A sometimes clever, sometimes ponderous montage.Pub Date: May 31, 2005
ISBN: 1-55192-572-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Polestar/Raincoast
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2005
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
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