by Bonita Young ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 18, 2006
Varying shades of forgiveness examined from a number of angles.
You’re only a bastard in your own mind.
A bright sprig of holly adorns the cover of Young’s debut novel, foreshadowing the uninspiring yuletide tragedy that sets this rambling bildungsroman in motion. When their aging father dies on Christmas, the four adult Michelson children come face to face with members of their father’s “other” family in a wonderfully awkward moment at a nursing home. Janice Michelson, 35, narrates this tale of abandonment and homecoming as visited upon her and her three illegitimate brothers raised in the late 20th-century Atlanta projects by their strong, caring mother and a largely absent father who never publicly acknowledged them. “How ironic,” says Janice, “[…] that after the torment of trying to love two families, Daddy died in a nursing home alone.” What begins as a quest to unearth her parents’ hidden past transforms into a somewhat conventional journey of self-discovery, as Janice wavers between sympathy and loathing for a father who stuck around just long enough to be missed when he left. Janice also worries that she shares her mother’s unhealthy tendency to fall for a married man. Some of the story’s most disturbingly sweeping observations emerge in lessons gleaned from conversations with her mother: “The need to feel secure, the need to be touched, the need to be kissed, to be caressed and adored, and to be made love to by the man you love. Every woman with blood rushing through her veins has these needs, even the need to hold on hoping that someday a man would leave another woman for you.” Apart from similarly stereotypical views of gender roles and a reductive rendering of homosexuality, the novel passably explores the stigmas associated with illegitimacy.
Varying shades of forgiveness examined from a number of angles.Pub Date: July 18, 2006
ISBN: 0-595-39521-X
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951
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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by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2006
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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