by Antony Archdeacon ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 22, 2008
A light, entertaining novel about greed, marital love and the inexplicable desire for solitude.
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In Archdeacon’s debut novel, a 58-year-old millionaire and member of the Queen’s Counsel sells his house and belongings in an attempt to begin a new life alone while his wife is away.
John Penry-Hudson is a hard-working, respectable lawyer en route to fulfilling his dream of serving as one of Her Majesty’s judges. His wife, Phyllis, has been spending increasingly lengthy amounts of time with her aging mother a few hours away. When Phyllis takes a three-month leave, John suddenly decides to simply up and leave his wife, his lucrative career and his native country—seemingly without forethought or motivation. The day Phyllis departs, John embarks upon a hasty, complicated plan to sell the house (which was solely in his name), write a series of letters to cover his tracks and convince everyone that his wife has left him. Just as everything begins falling into place and John successfully escapes to Spain briefly in an attempt to foil potential pursuers, Phyllis suddenly appears at his hotel with a detective, resulting in an international chase that takes John to France, Switzerland and an imaginary country called Grundia, where he intends to settle. Because John has technically done nothing illegal, he’s off the hook—that is until his wife, either spurred by love or vengeance, takes matters into her own hands. Written in clean, safe prose that occasionally drags—particularly in the overwrought dialogue and while John gets his affairs in order—Archdeacon’s novel is a fun, domestic thriller reminiscent of some of Graham Greene’s work. But something is missing; from the beginning, John’s motivations are frustratingly unclear. “He had originally intended to teach Phyllis a lesson she would never forget,” the narrator explains nearly a third of the way into the book, and until this point, aside from explaining that John and Phyllis’s relationship was fairly stable, that is as much information as the narration provides, leaving much of the storyline feeling frivolous without any context for their relationship. Still, the confusion behind John’s apparent lack of impetus offers enough tension to keep the pages turning.
A light, entertaining novel about greed, marital love and the inexplicable desire for solitude.Pub Date: July 22, 2008
ISBN: 978-1434338686
Page Count: 302
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: Oct. 11, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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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