Fasten your seatbelt for an enjoyable flight of fancy told in a confessional voice by likable people.
When Angel is born with tiny flaps perched on her shoulder blades, her unwed teen mother ignores medical advice to surgically remove them—and the result of this decision brings unexpected glory and grief to mother and daughter and those that they love.
Quick-thinking survivor Allison, cast out by judgmental parents when they learn she is pregnant after a frat house gang rape, has her baby and names her Angel. The single mother eventually parlays her knack for numbers into a job as a CPA. She meets Mark Dennison, one of the fraternity boys, who agrees to a DNA test and helps Allison investigate the others, but Angel’s paternity remains a mystery. Allison falls in love with her co-worker, widower Charlie Evans, who already has a young son, Nicky. They marry and have another child, Shelby. Life becomes ordinary—except that as she grows up, little Angel manifests an obsession that begins as a fascination with winged fairies, moves to flying dinosaurs and then to her wings of her own. In school Angel learns to hide her wings, but when she hits puberty they start growing again. Sharing the perky “can-do” attitude of her mother, Angel turns her exotic looks into a six-figure underwear modeling contract. Actual flying becomes Angel’s true passion and the realization of her dream comes at a high price for everyone, especially her mother, who develops her own obsession after tragedy strikes. Told in the first person, initially by Allison and then at the end by those Angel loved the most, including the dashing Jack who joins the grown-up Angel in her flight goal, Kelly’s fast-paced novel takes the reader on a flight of fancy couched in realistic, straight-forward and graceful prose that makes the fantastic utterly believable. Logistics, physics, feathers and ambition combine to draw the reader into Angel’s world. It’s hard to stop reading this gracefully written novel and the only quibble possible is that the last letters and diary entries seem anticlimactic and work too hard to explain exactly how everything happened.
Fasten your seatbelt for an enjoyable flight of fancy told in a confessional voice by likable people.Pub Date: Oct. 12, 2011
ISBN: 978-0615523064
Page Count: 259
Publisher: Flight Risk
Review Posted Online: Nov. 14, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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