A concept-driven work that runs afoul of reality.
Lives are ruined when a Satanic student plays erotic games with his teachers; a first novel from a 68-year-old Englishman.
The eponymous North, soon to graduate from his venerable Oxford high school, has already mastered the game of life; with his extraordinary charm and self-possession, he deals with adults as equals. We see this son of an American divorcée through the eyes of an unnamed narrator, a senior teacher who lives alone since his wife suffered irreparable brain damage and his grown children moved far away. Lonely and prone to depression, he has fallen under North’s spell, while aware of a darkness in the student’s character. Martin is not a subtle writer. In case we miss the point, North is compared early on to Lucifer, the fallen angel; Paradise Lost is mentioned again and again. Seeing the narrator as more indulgent spectator than player, North confides in him without fear of betrayal. His first move is to seduce Bernie, an attractive young female teacher who falls for him right away. This upsets Monty Ross, a handsome young science teacher; Monty is married (his wife Jess is pregnant) but intent on pursuing Bernie. North senses correctly (he is never wrong) that Monty is bisexual, and sets out to seduce him too; in no time, both teachers are in thrall to him. To add to his mischief, North encourages the latent attraction between Monty and the headmaster Aitken, also married and bisexual. The hothouse intrigue amounts to a damp squib, however, since the characters are simply pawns being moved by the omnipotent North who, with his high-flown dialogue (“we voluptuaries know what is most important…the Keatsian idea of the bursting grape”), is just not credible. By the end, he has caused a suicide attempt, a mental hospital confinement and two staff suspensions. Will the hapless, complicit narrator be his final victim? That remains a question mark.
A concept-driven work that runs afoul of reality.Pub Date: July 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-230-00738-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Macmillan UK/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2007
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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