Suffering and surviving in a hot-chocolate cosmos: Delinsky (For My Daughters, p. 495, etc.) serves up another successful nontaxing romance to carry women from the stress of their workdays into the untroubled oblivion of sleep. Can a heroine who spends her weekends baking pies, stripping wallpaper from her bathrooms (that's plural), and grinding her own coffee beans for an abusive husband find happiness? At least happiness that any of the rest of us can stomach reading about? Yes, Delinsky manages to make even this woman sympathetic and understandable. But only after she's undergone a lot of terrible pain. Emily Arkin and her two best friends are ladies in their 40s whose daughters have just left for college. They meet weekly, to love and support one another, at a diner in the small Massachusetts college town where they live. Emily needs some support. A loving and nurturing mother who barely looks older than 16, she is tortured by a tragic past—her infant son, Daniel, was kidnapped and never found—and a fairly lousy present. Her husband, Doug, is never home; he says he's working. A sympathetic police chief (everyone loves Emily, and no one likes Doug) brings widowed detective Brian and his motherless baby daughter, Julia, to rent Emily's garage apartment. Together Emily and Brian fix up the apartment, have long talks (over all the correct homemade foods and romance beverages), and fall in love. Emily finds out that Doug has been living with another woman for eight years. And when Brian digs under a neighbor's willow tree, he finds the body of little Daniel. Emily is reforged in her trials by fire and rises up a more independent woman, supported by her friends, her children, and her macho lover. A mushy and comforting romance. Makes a girl want to move to a small town and bake cookies for the police department. ($225,000 ad/promo)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-06-017780-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1994
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
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