Miss Tyler's landscapes of old houses, family gatherings have flattened, and stretched into an arid plain, and the interior and guarded loneliness of individuals becomes as abstracted as desert heat—shattering, heartbreaking, final. Highschool student Evie Decker, "short and wide, heavy footed," lives with her widowed father in small-town North Carolina. Evie, when she was home, listened to the radio all the time ("she had whole hours of silence to fill") and that's when she heard the cool hard voice of Drumsticks Casey, a nineteen-year-old rock musician who calls out picnic statements to the roadhouse teens—("He was picking blueberries. . . . She was emptying ashcans. . . . Have I got to tell you again?"). And Evie is helped out of the ladies' room with "CASEY" spelled backwards in slashes from nail scissors across her forehead. ("I believe this might be the best thing I've ever done. . . . Something out of character. Definite.") Drum grudgingly accepts Evie as a talisman and Evie accepts him as an alternative to a life of endless evenings. They stumble into marriage. Completely and neatly scissored off by their parents, the two youngsters never discover the right things to say, the big things that should happen, and love itself. But after their parting, Drum's slipping-down life contains a new unanswerable question, and Evie leaves, pregnant, to "get along" knowing that true love is for the movies. Lacking some of the delicacy of her earlier novels, perhaps, but Miss Tyler still exhibits a major talent, and this has a bleak, raw power.
Pub Date: March 11, 1970
ISBN: 0345478959
Page Count: 197
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1970
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
APPRECIATIONS
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