Mernit should lose the gimmicks and trust his talent.
This first novel by Mernit (Writing the Romantic Comedy: The Art and Craft of Writing Screenplays That Sell, 2000), a story analyst for Universal, concerns a screenwriter who employs the tricks of his trade to lure back his wife.
Transplanted New Yorker Jordan Moore doesn’t love Los Angeles, but his temperamental Italian wife Isabella finds it insufferable. Just as Jordan learns that Rumer Hawke, Hollywood’s hottest producer, wants to meet about Jordan’s screenplay, Isabella says basta! and jets to Rome for a long think about their marriage. Given one week to revise his screenplay to Rumer’s specifications, Jordan obsesses about getting Isabella back. He decides her jealous nature might work to his advantage. Unwilling to actually date another woman, he imagines one based on Naomi, a French former student from a screenwriting class he teaches. He conjures her perfectly. Maybe too perfectly, because she starts to appear, but only to him. Initially freaked out by this apparition, Jordan warms to Naomi’s playful spirit…and her savvy screenwriting advice. Soon, Jordan has made headway on the revision and, after he drops a few hints during transatlantic phone conversations, Isabella announces she is coming home. Complication follows: Seeing off a friend at LAX the day before Isabella’s return, Jordan is startled to spy Naomi at an airport phone booth. He is even more startled to discover that it’s not his Naomi now turning around and smiling at him in recognition, but the real Naomi. She is even sexier than he imagined and coincidentally in need of a place to stay that night. The story works best when the author is not trying so hard. The incidental scenes of Jordan trying to keep his cool and pride among the egos of studio execs are genuinely funny, but the female characters—Isabella, the spectral Naomi and the real Naomi—are all dolled-up clichés (or maybe screenplay characters in search of actors to flesh them out).
Mernit should lose the gimmicks and trust his talent.Pub Date: April 8, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-307-39537-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Shaye Areheart/Harmony
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2008
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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