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TUNNELING

Name: TUNNELING
Author: Beth Bosworth
ISBN: 0-609-61103-8

by Beth Bosworth ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 2003

Dazzling and off-putting at the same time.

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A theatrical first novel from Bosworth (stories: A Burden of Earth, 1995) folds fanciful literary time travel into the more earthbound coming-of-age travails of a young girl in late-’60s New Jersey.

Seventh-grader Rachel Finch is asthmatic and a seriously dorky bookworm whose passions run to Bertram Russell, the Dewey decimal system, and Franz Kafka, her activity confined as much by her overprotective father as by her asthma. At home, Rachel witnesses the growing rift between her parents. At school, her racially diverse classmates, who mixed together so easily in earlier grades, are fragmenting into angry cliques. And Rachel is getting hate notes, very possibly from her adored older sister. But Rachel escapes her unhappy daily life when she travels with S-Man, a politically correct if not terribly exciting superhero who travels through time to save literary greats from disaster. With Rachel’s help, he loosens Shakespeare’s writer’s block, stops Louis XIV from banning Diderot’s encyclopedia, and saves Chinua Achebe’s family from a bombing. In between archly highbrow escapades, Rachel develops a new friendship in real time. Rachel Fish shares Rachel Finch’s (if you like the book, you’ll also like the name similarity) literary passions and is equally if more bravely dorky. Rachel Finch hates keeping her life with S-Man a secret from this friend who is pulling her into real-life adventure, and Rachel’s two lives begin to converge when S-Man’s nemesis Laff Riot turns up in Teaneck. First, Rachel must help S-Man save all the great artists and thinkers who have ever been censured by society from a paradise of forgetfulness that would obviate their achievements. (If this sounds vague, it is.) Then S-Man helps her when a crazy Vietnam vet takes over Back-to-School night with Rachel’s schoolmates as paramilitary underlings. Lots of fireworks, literal and literary, but the writing is so self-consciously clever that even when a major character dies, the reader is likely to be unmoved.

Dazzling and off-putting at the same time.

Pub Date: July 1, 2003

ISBN: 0-609-61103-8

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Shaye Areheart/Harmony

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2003

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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MAGIC HOUR

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2006

Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.

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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

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
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by Kristin Hannah

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THE FOUR WINDS
by Kristin Hannah

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THE GREAT ALONE
by Kristin Hannah

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THE CATCHER IN THE RYE

by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951

A strict report, worthy of sympathy.

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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.