Despite the grim medical scenes: an intelligent confection, as sweet and easy to take as Sam’s frosting.
LeClaire (Leaving Eden, 2002, etc.) again tweaks the emotions as two estranged sisters are brought together by a medical emergency.
As children, Libby and Sam, felt so close that they pretended to be Siamese twins. Libby, the older, was the intrepid one, liking to test the limits and break the rules, while Sam was the good sister, making sure that Libby didn’t get into trouble. At college, Libby met and married Richard, a professor of music, and now she lives in the Midwest, where she’s raised twins Mercy and Matt. Instead of writing poetry as she’d once intended, she has become a fulltime if obsessive homemaker like her mother. Sam, now divorced, lives in a Massachusetts seaside town, where she makes cakes “worthy of being art.” She’s seeing Lee, who restores wooden boats, and suspects she has fallen in love with him. He’s both sensitive and sensible, and Sam’s life is going well. With one exception: Six years ago, when Libby visited unexpectedly, Sam caught her and then-husband Jay in bed, and, hurt by the betrayal, Sam refused either to hear Libby’s explanation or contact her later. While Sam’s life finally seems to be coming together, Libby has just been diagnosed with kidney disease. The doctors recommend a transplant, but the waiting list is long, so Libby first asks her brother Josh, as Richard has the wrong blood-type, but Josh refuses to be even tested. That leaves Sam, who ignores Libby’s calls until she learns from Josh’s wife that Libby is ill. Reluctantly and at Lee’s urging, Sam flies to see Libby. After some initial awkwardness and misunderstandings, the two become reconciled and Sam offers a kidney. Still other challenges and disappointments await—Libby suspects that Richard is being unfaithful again, and daughter Mercy briefly disappears—before satisfactory resolutions fall into place.
Despite the grim medical scenes: an intelligent confection, as sweet and easy to take as Sam’s frosting.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46045-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2004
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
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