O'Sullivan's first novel pays vivid tribute to a Brooklyn boyhood and an Irish heritage, both steeped in fantasy, while detailing family tensions and street altercations that were an integral part of neighborhood life in the 1950's. From stickball showdowns of which legends are made to first tentative contacts between boy and girl, O'Sullivan uses a sensitive, sure hand to convey the moods and perils of adolescence. Mike Driscoll is torn between conflicting influences in his young life: on the one hand, he treasures moments spent with his father Jimmy, who works his heart out to support his family but still retains a poetic and sympathetic worldview; on the other hand, he also worships at the altar of Deucey Doyle, stickball champion and local war hero, but a man whose violent temper, bigotry, and underworld habits lead him to plot the destruction of a black Baptist congregation holding services in the local movie theater. Mike drops squarely into a moral dilemma when he overhears Deucey talking about the dynamite he's stashed to do the job, and agonizes over whether to become a squealer by revealing his secret to the police. He does—thereby precipitating a bizarre sequence of events that destroys his family and ends with his father's death by fire in the Navy Yard. Such melodramatic trappings are given substance by a complex cluster of haunting images from Ireland and colorful scenes of Brooklyn life from the standpoint of an adolescent, so that the tale simultaneously shimmers in rosy hues—like a dream fondly remembered—and stirs with undercurrents of malice and death. Evocative, potent, and, above all, disturbingly real: an auspicious debut.
Pub Date: May 5, 1992
ISBN: 0-939149-67-2
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Soho
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1992
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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