A tautly written, haunting tale of loneliness, alienation, and lost hopes and dreams.
A finely wrought first novel about a young woman who returns to her hometown upon being notified of the violent death of her older sister.
It’s not an auspicious beginning for twentysomething Katey Bruscke, as she arrives back home after an absence of two years. For one thing, she’s there not because she wants to be but because her beloved, drug-addicted sister Reese has just been murdered. For another, first thing off the bus she’s mugged at gunpoint by a guy who turns out to be someone she went to high school with. After reminiscing with him over a cheese Danish, Katey, who has abruptly left her lover (or is he?) back in Colorado, she proceeds to sleep with her younger sister’s boyfriend, reacquaint herself with old friends, most of them going nowhere fast, identify Reese’s bullet-ridden body, and wander aimlessly through the bleak, dreary suburban landscape as she attempts to come to grips with her sister’s death and her own nomadic life. There’s not much plot here, but Gussoff has an especially keen eye for detail. The language is stark and powerful, and her description of Katey’s family life offers a disturbing glimpse of the other side of the American Dream: “Time always moved over our family, moving over us silently. We gathered dust, we lived like bordering countries. Everyday events secret; there was no common language to use. If I said, I’m afraid. I’m confused, our mother would clutch her sides, answering. Oh, darling, my arthritis. Lupus. Fibromyalgia. Our father falling silent, waiting to be excused. It couldn’t be what I meant, I’d say. It’s okay. I’m fine. I’d kill my words, and in killing them, slowly die. This is what I learn from Reese. All the games. To make me strong, she said.”
A tautly written, haunting tale of loneliness, alienation, and lost hopes and dreams.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2000
ISBN: 1-85242-458-2
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Serpent’s Tail
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2000
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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