A book that’s likely to be best remembered for putting an attractive human face on an esoteric craft.
A committed dowser but reluctant psychic is the winsome protagonist of this sixth novel from Morrow (Ariel’s Crossing, 2002, etc.), which occupies a middle ground between domestic realism and Gothic suspense.
Don’t go to the movies, warned the ominously named Cassandra. But why would a 14-year-old daredevil listen to a kid sister half his age? So Christopher went, and died in a car crash. For Cass, this would be the first of her so-called forevisions, many associated with death, all of them profoundly discomfiting. Dowsing, or divining, is a different matter entirely. Her trustworthy father Nep divines for water; it’s a family tradition, though Cass is the first female with the gift. When we meet her as an adult, she’s a single parent with twin 11-year-old boys, living near her parents in rural upstate New York; she makes her living divining and teaching part-time. What triggers Morrow’s story is her discovery, while dowsing in the woods, of a teenage girl hanging from a tree. She’s vanished by the time the cops arrive, but they do find a disoriented live girl, Laura Bryant, a presumed runaway. Just as pressing as the mystery of the hanged girl is the news that Nep, her anchor, has early-stage Alzheimer’s. She’s not the only one now for whom reality is slippery. Cass lacks the religious faith of her mother, who thinks dowsing is pagan. Morrow does a fine job portraying a family whose love transcends sharply conflicting worldviews, a family sometimes battered by malicious gossip. He is less successful with the suspense strand, which involves too many flashbacks to Cass’s childhood. There’s a boogeyman pursuing her, but who, and what is his connection to Laura Bryant? Morrow’s timing is off. After a laborious buildup, there’s a pell-mell finale; Cass’s nemesis is a sketchily drawn childhood acquaintance. And, oh yes, he’s a serial killer.
A book that’s likely to be best remembered for putting an attractive human face on an esoteric craft.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-547-38263-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2010
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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