by Andrea Louie ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 12, 1995
A first novel as beautifully wrought but as emotionally remote as a stylized Chinese painting, detailing a young Chinese-American woman's bittersweet journey through memory and the present in search of meaning and self. Born in a small midwestern town where her parents, both first- generation immigrants, had settled and prospered, narrator Maya Li opens her account of her journey at its end—the southern tip of China, where she is spending the last night before leaving for home. Maya's voyage has a long history. As she begins the recollections that intersect with descriptions of the tour she's just made, she recalls that her odyssey began with a futile childhood search in her all-American hometown for moon cakes, traditional symbols of wholeness honored by her father, a doctor whose warm nature contrasted with the cool perfectionism of her mother and older sister. Depressed by her dead-end New York job and haunted by the past, Maya is searching for a completeness that her hyphenated background has not offered so far. As her tour group visits the major sights from a Mongolian yurt camp to the tombs of Xian, Maya begins to understand herself and her Chinese heritage. She recalls her father's early death; her undistinguished adolescence; her futile love for Lance, who later died of AIDS; and the great love of her life, Hong Kong native Alex, who left her because loyalty drew him home. Now she understands that she has also been looking for ``that pull of home'' Alex had obeyed and her father had listened for even in America. Wonderful rendering of details, both domestic and foreign—the sections on China are especially vivid—but Maya, like so many first-novel protagonists, is overwhelmed by her mission to relate and remember. Still, a writer to watch.
Pub Date: June 12, 1995
ISBN: 0-345-38554-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1995
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by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2006
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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by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951
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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