Begins with a fresh, funny eye, but runs out of steam halfway to its foregone conclusion.
Contemporary retelling of Pygmalion set among the cutthroat Social Register crowd.
Poor Wyatt Hayes: It’s so boring when you have it all! The Manhattan blueblood has led a life of aimless leisure since obtaining his Harvard doctorate in anthropology more than ten years ago. His insufferable girlfriend Cornelia Rockman is a pedigreed socialite with the opportunistic instincts of a vulture. When she “trades up” to have her photo taken at a party with the 20-ish son of a private-equity billionaire, 37-year-old Wyatt senses “a terrifying shift in the natural order.” He dumps Cornelia on the spot and drunkenly vows to his friend Trip that he could take any girl off the street and turn her into a socialite. Enter Lucy Jo Ellis, just fired from her job in the garment district and now dodging the rain under an awning next to Wyatt. A deal is struck, and Midwestern Lucy Jo is transformed via diet, exercise with a personal trainer, facials, new hairstyle and designer clothes, as well as extensive lessons in elocution, vacation geography, the social register, the art of inoffensive cocktail banter and a CliffNotes version of culture. Wyatt has given her a fake identity (same name, different life) with the promise that after his experiment Lucy will have made enough important contacts to start her own design house. Meanwhile, Cornelia vows revenge on the usurper who has replaced her in Wyatt’s heart and on the social circuit; Trip and his longtime girlfriend Eloise have commitment issues; and Cornelia’s BFF Fernanda may decide to marry for love—can you imagine? Clark (Because She Can, 2007) has a keen eye, but the vacuous life of the super-rich is an easy target. That leaves the novel riding on the budding romance between Lucy and not-entirely-likable Wyatt. Eliza Doolittle and Henry Higgins they ain’t.
Begins with a fresh, funny eye, but runs out of steam halfway to its foregone conclusion.Pub Date: Dec. 16, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-60286-082-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Weinstein Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2009
An improvement over The Dead Zone, with King returning to his most tried-and-true blueprint. As in The Shining, the psi-carrier is a child, an eight-year-old girl named Charlie; but instead of foresight or hindsight, Charlie has firestarting powers. She looks and a thing pops into flame—a teddy bear, a nasty man's shoes, or (by novel's end) steel walls, whole houses, and stables and crowds of government villains. Charlie's parents Vicky and Andy were once college guinea pigs for drug experiments by The Shop, a part of the supersecret Department of Scientific Intelligence, and were given a hyperpowerful hallucinogen which affected their chromosomes and left each with strange powers of mental transference and telekinesis. When Vicky and Andy married, their genes produced Charlie and her wild talent for pyrokinesis: even as a baby in her crib, Charlie would start fires when upset and, later on, once set her mother's hands on fire. So Andy is trying to teach Charlie how to keep her volatile emotions in check. But when one day he comes home to find Vicky gruesomely dead in the ironing-board-closet, murdered by The Shop (all the experimental guinea pigs are being eliminated), Andy goes into hiding with Charlie in Manhattan and the Vermont backwoods—and Charlie uses her powers to set the bad men on fire and blow up their cars. They're soon captured, however, by Rainbird, a one-eyed giant Indian with a melted face—and father and daughter, separated, spend months being tested in The Shop. Then Andy engineers their escape, but when Andy is shot by Rainbird, Charlie turns loose her atomic eyes on the big compound. . . . Dumb, very, and still a far cry from the excitement of The Shining or Salem's Lot—but King keeps the story moving with his lively fire-gimmick and fewer pages of cotton padding than in his recent, sluggish efforts. The built-in readership will not be disappointed.
Pub Date: Sept. 29, 1980
ISBN: 0451167805
Page Count: 398
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1980
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
PLB 0-688-13166-2 King Midas And The Golden Touch ($16.00; PLB $15.63; Apr.; 32 pp.; 0-688-13165-4; PLB 0-688-13166-2): The familiar tale of King Midas gets the golden touch in the hands of Craft and Craft (Cupid and Psyche, 1996). The author takes her inspiration from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s retelling, capturing the essence of the tale with the use of pithy dialogue and colorful description. Enchanting in their own right, the illustrations summon the Middle Ages as a setting, and incorporate colors so lavish that when they are lost to the uniform gold spurred by King Midas’s touch, the point of the story is further burnished. (Picture book. 7-9)
Pub Date: April 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-688-13165-4
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1999
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