Uncomplicated Southern farce that works with bubbling bravado.
A group of darling elderly Southern ladies with fanciful names prove their mettle in Trobaugh’s precious, endearingly soap-and-bath-powder latest (after Swan Place, 2002, etc.).
On the death of one of its members, Love-Divine Brockett King, the Tea-Olive Bird Watching Society inherits the 13 acres of wooded land next to her farmhouse, handy when the group needs to spy on the new resident there, a widower judge from New York. The five ladies of the society, all but one native to Tea-Olive, Ga., and named after lyrics in the Baptist Hymnal (Beulah, Sweet, Wildwood and Zion—Memphis being the exception), “behaved appropriately at all times,” except when one of the group, the renegade unmarried Sweet, lets herself be secretly wooed by the mysterious judge. Nuptials follow a little too hastily, and Sweet finally gets the man of her dreams, settling into Love-Divine’s old farmhouse—until the judge’s autocratic temper begins to assert itself. After a bit of snooping, which the society ladies excel at because they know everyone in town, they learn that the judge’s two previous wives died suspiciously. He now gets himself invited to join the city council, makes noises about dissolving the town’s library and stops allowing Sweet to see her old friends. “I spend every minute of my life trying to avoid making him angry,” says she pathetically. When Sweet is spotted with a bruised eye, the ladies take action and plot ways of murdering the hateful old judge, first by poisoning his turtle stew (they have to get a large turtle and try to kill it first), then by letting the judge’s bull out of its pen to trample him. Though couched in a saccharine irony, the story is a grim tale of elderly female powerlessness turned upside-down, and Sweet’s bruises and subjugation by the evil, controlling widower are no laughing matter. Trobaugh knows her audience, and she fine-tunes her sweet-tempered ladies-of-steel in sharp, witty characterizations.
Uncomplicated Southern farce that works with bubbling bravado.Pub Date: July 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-525-94879-1
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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