An elegant, refined story of families, wartime, and the mystique of memory.
A daughter tries to understand her father’s long absences from her life in this effective and accomplished debut.
Cleaning out her father’s scruffy bachelor apartment after his funeral, Anna Schoene discovers his copiously detailed journals. They transport this 30-year-old mother of two from Southern California back to her childhood in Shanghai, where she lived with her mother and father just before WWII. Born in China, the son of missionaries, Joseph Schoene is at once flamboyantly American yet fiercely committed to the land of his birth. The charismatic, dashing chief of a quasi-legal import/export business in Shanghai, he means the world to his more proper American wife and adoring daughter. Enraptured with the city’s sights and smells, he imparts this love to Anna: “My father handed Shanghai down to me as though it were an inheritance, a family treasure meant only for me.” But encroaching Japanese soldiers and floods of refugees make the city less and less tenable until, on the eve of war, Anna and her mother board a ship for America. Joseph resolutely stays behind, insisting that it will all blow over. But soon occupying Japanese troops throw him into a prison camp, where he barely survives. Meanwhile, in California, Anna and her mother are adjusting to a quieter life of school, laundry, and sunshine. Caldwell’s prose is remarkably even and detailed; she seamlessly weaves together Anna’s own memories with those of her father, gleaned from the journals. Many of the Shanghai scenes are undeniably reminiscent of J.G. Ballard’s Empire of the Sun, but the voice is Caldwell’s own. Anna’s emotionally reticent narration can seem almost stuffy, but it helps keep this from descending into the mawkishness common in such father-daughter tales. And the vivid evocation of Shanghai’s potent sights, sounds, and smells has all the excitement you could want.
An elegant, refined story of families, wartime, and the mystique of memory.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-8118-3240-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Chronicle Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
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
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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