From the author, most recently, of Doll's Eyes (1993): a mild horror novel loaded with domestic description, turnoff vulgarity, and banal writing. Wood is best known for Twins (1977), a novel adapted from real life and later filmed as Dead Ringers with Jeremy Irons in a grandly monstrous dual role as twin gynecologists. Set beside that triumph, The Basement is, well, the basement. For decades, Myra Fox Ludens has been famous among her circle of friends for putting up with the horrid, shivery, smelly basement of her fine Connecticut home. Now she's spent a small fortune to revamp it, get rid of every ghastly feature, and make it suitable for club meetings. Too bad she still can't go down there, even accompanied by her club, without the whole crew getting clammy and having to hustle back upstairs. When she finds out that the ground under her basement holds the 300-year-old bones of a witch hung on nearby Hillgate (``Hellgate'') Hill, who was refused churchyard burial and cast into a grave now under this house, Myra decides on exorcism, and she and some friends set forth to collect the arcane materials for a rite to drive out ghosts. This, however, only upsets the ghost, which apparently decides to reside in Myra herself. Suddenly Myra finds herself gifted with PK, or psychokinetic powers. When her blustery, vile neighbor offends her, Myra unknowingly calls down a plague of bees that sting him to death. Another bad guy, a wife- beater, is sucked to death by a plague of ticks. Wood misfires, however, when she has the novel's greatest menace reduced to a subplot about a hebephrenic woman who becomes possessed and goes on a rampage only Myra can stop. Some lively scenes here and there but largely a wax turkey stuffed with wax grapes.
Pub Date: April 27, 1995
ISBN: 0-688-13351-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1995
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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