Jackson (The View From Here, 1997) returns with a genuinely moving if rather bloated tale of a young African-American man returning home to bury his father. Twenty-eight-year-old Jeremy “Patience” Bishop leaves Manhattan, where he is a successful and increasingly well-known photographer, for the funeral of his father, Christopher Bishop, and author Jackson provides an abundance of memories and events before unraveling the ambiguous history behind the relation between Jeremy and his father. The story opens as Jeremy arrives in his hometown of Elsewhere, Louisiana. His mother, though she died shortly after Jeremy’s birth, first compelled Christopher to give the toddler to Mama B and Aunt Jess to be raised. Because his father thus disappeared from the boy’s childhood, Jeremy is understandably conflicted over his return, uncertain in his feelings both toward the women who loved and raised him and toward the new family—his father’s second wife Carol and their children—that he’s related to mostly by strangeness. Jeremy’s encounters with childhood friends, and his reminiscences with Jess, one of Carol’s children, provide Jackson opportunity to reconstruct the finer details of Jeremy’s estrangement from his father and the context surrounding it. But the disparity between what needs to be known here to let the drama emerge and the amount that is made known can give the feel of an interesting short story’s being expanded to the size of a novel. The wait is long before we learn what the hard secret was behind Christopher’s abandonment of his son—even though that secret’s surprising twists are in many respects worth the wait and offer an intriguing and variant contribution to the theme of the “disintegrating African-American family.” Moving in its core idea—and in its ending—but Jackson, overall, has plumped too many narrative calories into an otherwise lean, and nicely told, story. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-671-56893-0
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
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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