Newcomer Bell creates an engaging and sympathetic character while skillfully exploring the nature of obsession and human...
A disturbing, often compelling first novel about a feisty young woman who’s had more than her share of abuse, cruelty, and loss but fights her way back to sanity.
Narrator Clarisse Broder, 31, is married to a rich, boring Wall Street guy with a fetish for dogs (his alarm clock doesn’t buzz, it barks). They met in a hospital, where Clarisse was supposedly recovering from an emergency appendectomy, and married a week later. As a result, there’s a lot he doesn’t know, and, despite Clarisse’s clever banter and wry sense of humor, it’s obvious that she’s haunted by sinister memories. The truth is that Beth, as she was once known, ran away from home at 16 and was taken in by a sadistic pimp named Ben, who tortured her physically and psychologically until she became a willing member of the stable of boys and girls he directed in S/M performances for the benefit of wealthy clients. The renamed Clarisse finds that a dull suburban existence isn’t enough to make her feel safe or happy, and there’s a nagging secret lurking just below her conscious recall. When the book of stories her husband encourages her to write develops a cult following, she worries that her past will be exposed. Desperate for relief, she decides to kill herself, but instead begins thinking about “a different type of suicide, the kind where you end up free, in a new life that you yourself decide.” To this end, she calls on Ben for help—a mistake that eventually prompts her to jump off the Brooklyn Bridge in an attempt to escape him. This proves to be the first step in a harrowing flight across the country, until Beth/Clarisse winds up in the arms of a woman whose love enables her to recover her memory and her life.
Newcomer Bell creates an engaging and sympathetic character while skillfully exploring the nature of obsession and human need: a graphically violent but impressive debut.Pub Date: July 5, 2000
ISBN: 0-684-87035-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2000
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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