Newcomer Mark joins the Masters-of-the-Maudlin Club with this treacly and overwrought indulgence about a physics prof who loses his family. Jackson Tate couldn’t imagine being happier than he is in Wendell, Illinois, with his lovingly renovated old farmhouse, his teaching job, his perfect wife Nancy and two beloved kids—until a drunk driver, one afternoon while Jackson is at home working on the roof, jumps lanes and kills Jackson’s entire family. Plunged into an abyss of despair, grief, and rage, Jackson, not much later, telling no one, hits the road (in a run-down van he calls the Quark) to meander slowly cross country, with the result that readers meet him as he gazes over the sea outside a small Maine town in the spring. And not just Jackson, either, since a cute-meet of cosmic proportion is necessary for the very genesis of Mark’s “from-the-ashes-of-death” get-well-card of a novel. On the beach, Jackson sees Olivia Faraday (“her bronze hair . . . whipped by the wind . . . like petals around her face”) and finds himself “drawn to her, as a child reaches for the first flower he sees as being yellow.” Chance (a broken radiator hose) dictates that Jackson see Olivia again when he checks into the seaside inn she operates by herself apparently. Becoming Olivia’s handyman and, with glacial slowness, her lover, Jackson learns that, just as his own family has been lost, Olivia has also “lost” her husband—yes, to Alzheimer’s. Can happiness be found by Olivia and Jackson? Maybe, but not until after Jackson returns to Illinois to take care of, well, something terrible (Olivia: “She nodded. “Sometimes going back is the only way we can move forward.’ She sighed”). And so, amid sighs, nods, blowing hair, and carefully sprinkled snippets of physics (“It’s a pull between us, like electrons spinning around an atom”), things do, or don’t, work out. Let the people decide. It’s a democracy, isn’t it? (A Book-of-the-Month featured alternate)
Pub Date: April 5, 1999
ISBN: 0-399-14447-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1999
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
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