James can be entertaining, and he may stir warm memories of academic satires by Kingsley Amis, Mary McCarthy, or Randall...
A debate over erecting statues to honor two British university heads reveals some of the farcical ambitions, bureaucracy, and cant that are found only in academia.
Welsh crime writer James (First Fix Your Alibi, 2016, etc.), known for the Harpur and Iles series, posits two provincial universities in one city with opposing reactions to government austerity in the 1980s. Under the bumptious Lawford Chote, Sedge is millions over budget, while Victor Tane has kept Charter Mill’s finances in line with reality. The story moves back and forth between 1987, when Chote is mulling unrealistic plans to take over the other school, and 2014, when a committee of the schools—which in fact were merged under Tane—is mulling whether statues planned for Chote and Tane should occupy one plinth or two and on which campus they should reside. Readers will simply have to suspend disbelief in the idea that two provincial university principals would deserve statues under any government budget. Some of the humor is rather forced, but the committee meetings are often funny in their deadpan mockery of self-important educators given license to opine. One character is so perfectly absurd it’s hard to read him without having the image of Stephen Fry constantly in mind. Another humorous thread begins with a talk on Lady Chatterley’s Lover by Martin Moss in which he refers to some physical variation by the gamekeeper and the lady with a phrase that manages to arouse Chote’s wife from her snoring, gin-deadened state in the lecture hall’s front row. Principal Chote believes thereafter that Moss is something special, while allusions to his Chatterley trick pepper the novel.
James can be entertaining, and he may stir warm memories of academic satires by Kingsley Amis, Mary McCarthy, or Randall Jarrell, but his effort isn’t up to that pantheon.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-7278-8642-2
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 21, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2016
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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