Nelson's first story collection, The Expendables, won the 1990 Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction, and her second is even better—tough-talking, provocative tales that plunge deep into the heart of love and solitude. Male or female, regardless of age, Nelson's protagonists are a standoffish, unblinking bunch. In her arresting title story, a Chicago waitress—whose three teenaged brothers have captured her rapist and insist on a confrontation—stares out at the snow and reflects on the misnomer of justice in an unjust world; in ``The Happy Day,'' the unhappy assistant to a wedding photographer compulsively shoots images of blinking brides, weeping flower- girls, and puking best men to paste up on her walk-up apartment walls; in ``Fire Season,'' a petty thief stands at the bedroom door of a rich, teenaged one-night stand and wonders why he's unable to rob her; and in ``Goodbye, Midwest,'' the grown daughter of intellectual snobs guiltily ignores the wedding announcements that regularly arrive from her childhood best friend. Divided between urban, middle-class settings and the isolated adobe dwellings of the Southwest, Nelson's stories share an aridity of vision and terseness of language that refresh and clarify in spite of some depressing themes and inexplicably abrupt conclusions. Her isolated, uncompromising men and women, hungering for human contact yet feeling powerless to change, still take private satisfaction in the slight, everyday revelations of the soul, and find a separate peace more durable than romantic happy endings. Sharp-edged American fiction, by a very promising writer.
Pub Date: Feb. 21, 1992
ISBN: 0-688-10657-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1991
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
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