There's a funky domestic intimacy about this account of a middle-aged hippie trying to hang on to his youthful ideals and his gorgeous 21-year-old girlfriend who wants a job on Wall Street. Contrived yippie vs. yuppie conflict? In part, but Dick Howser, the first-person narrator of ad-exec Palmer's first novel, is a shrewd and engaging character. He's overweight, runs a junk store in Woodstock, N.Y., and is deep into midlife crisis and annoying power games, but he also has a heart, taking in both Leslie Zack, a senior at the local college who needs lodging after her dorm burns down, and his long-lost ten-year-old son Howard, a love child, who has hated him for having been an absentee dad and who shows up with his mother's ashes stored in a peanut brittle can. Dick, your basic lonely guy, adores both kids; but the sex scenes between him and the rather vacuous Leslie are more acrobatic than emotional, and the prose is excessively purple at times. More heartfelt is the bonding that finally takes place between father and son. ``Howard, please forgive me! Please let me love you!'' Dick tearfully implores. Howard, meanwhile, has his eye on Leslie as a replacement mom. He joins Dad in a complex conspiracy to keep her at home, protected from naughty New York City—whose latest serial criminal is the dreaded ``Butt Biter.'' One strategy by the senior Howser involves a ``love strike,'' in which Dick ignores Leslie, assuming a ``Shamanic State of Consciousness''—separating his mind from his body. But eventually the varied plans backfire badly, in large part because Dick, fearing bad karma throughout eternity, needs to confess. A crude, sexist, sometimes homophobic fairy tale, but often great fun—like the mud of Woodstock Nation.
Pub Date: Aug. 17, 1994
ISBN: 0-517-59919-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Harmony
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1994
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
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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