To be sure, there’s gallantry in Mary Lincoln’s struggle against her demons. But 600-plus pages with a disagreeable woman...
A skilled historical novelist (Dead Water, 2004, etc.) limns an absolutely convincing portrait of Mary Todd Lincoln—and that’s the catch.
She’s so depressing. In Hambly’s evocation, her temper is execrable, her tongue venomous, her close relationships all problematical. With her husband, the legendary president, the descriptive word is strained; with her son Robert, it’s savage. She’s a grudge-holder and her enemies are forever, her friendships, for the most part, transitory. This is a woman who clings to paranoia as if it were her birthright. Hambly begins her story in 1875, ten years after that horrific night at the Ford Theater when John Wilkes Booth fired a bullet into the president’s head, drenching Mrs. Lincoln in his blood. Wintry, better say glacial, Robert, having decided magisterially that his mother is insane, has convened what amounts to a kangaroo court and brought her before it. Predictably, she’s judged to be as mentally incompetent as her son says she is and consigned to an asylum. Mrs. Lincoln does not go quietly, and while she rails against this latest betrayal, Hambly takes us back and forth in time to examine other betrayals. Even as an antebellum belle, she is tormented and tormenting. She meets Lincoln, is powerfully attracted, an attraction at first mutual. But he’s wary, senses danger, attempts to elude her. She traps him with a lie. As first lady, she’s a political cross for her husband to bear, which he does, patiently, even in the face of a hysterical demand that he fire—of all people—Ulysses S. Grant because she can’t abide his wife. Is she crazy? Everybody who knows her knows she is, says someone closer to her than most: “Crazy though not insane.”
To be sure, there’s gallantry in Mary Lincoln’s struggle against her demons. But 600-plus pages with a disagreeable woman tends to undercut empathy.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-553-80301-8
Page Count: 624
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2004
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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