Sentimental and rather slow.
Successful American immigrants rescue hundreds of Jews from Nazi Germany in this latest from memoirist and novelist Carter (Swim to Me, 2007, etc.).
The bulk of the novel traces the pre-1930s history of Carter’s hero and heroine. In 1892, his mother sends nine-year-old Simon Phelps to America from Vilna, Lithuania. Despite years of searching, he never hears from her or the rest of his family again. A bright, artistic boy, he quickly becomes successful in lithography, window dressing and then in advertising. In 1909 he falls in love with Flora Grossman, who has come to America with her sister Seema. Unlike Simon, Flora remains in touch with her mother and younger sister in Germany. Flora and Simon marry and live happily; his thoughtful reserve and strong convictions compliment her more carefree, easygoing, conventional nature. They enjoy increasing financial success and contentment, marred only by their inability to have children. Meanwhile, sexy, complex Seema, who unlike Flora always felt rejected by their mother, breaks with tradition, allowing herself to be kept by a married non-Jew with anti-Semitic tendencies. When their mother dies in 1928, Flora and Seema return to Germany. Seema feels an unexpected connection to their homeland and decides to remain. She falls in love with a journalist who convinces her to convert to Catholicism to escape being branded a Jew. In the early ’30s, Simon and Flora go to Europe with money and documents he has prepared to get as many family members out of Germany as possible. Carter gives disappointingly short shrift to this final act of the drama.
Sentimental and rather slow.Pub Date: Aug. 25, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-56512-594-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2009
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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