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FORGIVE ME

An acute, sharp-angled love story with a rare sense of history.

Always-on-the-run journalist thrill-seeker is finally forced to deal with the consequences of the horrors she loves to report.

The heroine of Ward's powerful and fast-paced novel (How to Be Lost, 2004, etc.) isn't anybody's idea of a nice girl. Edging into her mid-30s, Nadine is a hotshot newspaper stringer who's always been better at escaping than living, dashing off to whatever foreign land is hosting the most saleable atrocities while ignoring family and friends. As the story begins, Nadine has just barely escaped being killed by drug traffickers in Mexico and is recuperating in her father’s bed-and-breakfast in the “small and strange” Cape Cod fishing village of her childhood, “now populated by drunks and scientists.” Another big story is brewing, and barely functioning Nadine is hungry to get away, this time back to South Africa, where the Truth and Reconciliation Commission is taking testimony from victims of Apartheid violence. There is a local connection—a white boy from Nadine's town who moved to one of the townships to teach was killed by a mob of blacks chanting “one settler, one bullet”—and a personal one: Nadine once lived there, and when she left, to pursue yet another story, she left behind the love of her life. Nadine's bratty and selfish behavior is on full display (in fits of adolescent pique, she tries to impress her sad and widowed father and spurned once-best friend with her worldliness) and there are flashbacks to her earlier South African sojourn, as well as episodes from the journal of the murdered boy. The flashbacks encompass an impressive amount of the country's history and cataclysmic violence; the journal episodes, meanwhile, are a distraction, the rare wrong note in a tightly constructed and oddly romantic novel.

An acute, sharp-angled love story with a rare sense of history.

Pub Date: June 26, 2007

ISBN: 978-0-345-49446-7

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Random House

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2007

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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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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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