The Barnacle family has a storied history in Ontario, Canada, living in comfort in Lawrence Park, a wealthy neighborhood in...
Logan’s debut novel describes the ribald and twisted adventures of an affluent Toronto girl and her problematic clan.
The Barnacle family has a storied history in Ontario, Canada, living in comfort in Lawrence Park, a wealthy neighborhood in north Toronto. After the tragic death of a young daughter, their other daughter, Marie Dorée, becomes something of a family treasure. Nonetheless, she and her brothers live in fear of their rage-filled father, Raul, who cracks the whip at the slightest opportunity. Their mother, Tabitha, is an old-school, frugal woman who dispenses increasingly convoluted rationalizations for her controlling ways. Through endless attempts at preserving their family’s status in society, the Barnacles try to either guide or force their children into becoming adults that will be worthy of the family name. Marie finally escapes to college but begins her adult life by causing disaster after disaster both personally and, later, professionally. Her meddling family is always around to dispense advice and commands and to make every situation worse, until it becomes obvious that Marie may never break free of their collective grip. Told in a satirical voice that readily skewers “the lower upper-class” of Toronto, Logan’s narrative is at once intellectual, literate, weirdly funny, and unsettling. As Marie’s adventures take her from one awful relationship to another, including a turn in India and a rather odd friendship with a neurotic Scotsman, Logan uncovers bizarre and perverse desires in characters that otherwise would be vividly described caricatures. Logan has written an absorbing, frightening, and sometimes–long-winded satire (one character’s recitation goes on for eight pages, for example). The novel’s characters have intense, inward ruminations that lean toward the overwrought. The power of Logan’s storytelling, however, saves this book from being a simple farce and makes it something more like tragedy.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-0-9940098-0-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Fire & Ash Publishers
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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