A slow-paced, satisfying read.
Acoming-of-age story and a family saga fit comfortably together in this overstuffed easy chair of a novel.
The form of the novel is familiar enough—a sprawling narrative focusing on one fateful summer in the life of a family—but its plot and narrative tone are more complex than usual for the genre. In a small town in Michigan in 1928, the Bearwald family—distinguished father, vibrant mother and two young adult daughters—comes undone. The upright and respected owners of a clothing store, the Bearwalds are the only Jewish family in their town, and the only family with an autistic daughter. Their oldest girl, Cleo, is clever but erratic, and the youngest, narrator Rebecca, is responsible and dependable. Although the family seems solid, the summer’s events show that the relationship of mutual caretaking between the daughters is the glue that holds everyone together. Once the sisters go their own ways, the family falls apart. How they become individuals is the most unlikely aspect of the story: A bootlegger’s ship runs aground after a late-night shootout, Cleo restores it and sells the illegal liquor she finds on it. Meanwhile, Cleo’s mother, tired of being a country mouse, leads people to believe that her husband heads a bootlegging gang, thus provoking retaliation from actual bootleggers. What really sustains this is not the Byzantine plot, but the precisely drawn motives behind the characters’ actions. Just when it seems as though the author will have all the loose ends tied up, he lingers with painful clarity on the dynamics of the family: the way that Mrs. Bearwald’s desire for excitement leads to shameful social performances, the way that Rebecca’s desire for freedom manifests itself in her declaration that her beloved sister Cleo is so sick as to be outside the social order. The depiction of the Bearwalds’ evolution as people and as a family is pitch-perfect.
A slow-paced, satisfying read.Pub Date: April 18, 2006
ISBN: 1-59051-213-8
Page Count: 360
Publisher: Handsel/Other Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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