Passably engaging, principally for its meditations on the ever-shifting challenges facing women artists.
Goodman’s latest melding of faux folklore and neo-gothic melodrama (The Night Villa, 2008, etc.).
When Meg Rosenthal is offered a teaching position and free tuition for daughter Sally at a bucolic boarding school in the Catskills, she can hardly refuse. She’s been exiled from Long Island by hedgie husband Jude’s recent business collapse, followed shortly by his sudden death of a heart attack. Originally an artists’ colony founded in the late 1920s by lesbian couple Vera Beecher and Lily Eberhardt, the Arcadia School is an ideal venue for Meg’s academic specialty, fairy tales. Indeed, its grounds ominously recall the setting of her favorite fable, “The Changeling Girl,” which Lily wrote and illustrated. During Arcadia’s annual fall pagan festival, a student, Isabel, falls off a cliff on the edge of campus. Years before, Lily fell to her death from the same cliff, much to Vera’s everlasting grief and chagrin, especially since she believed Lily had forsaken her for society painter Virgil Nash. Called in to investigate Isabel’s death, broodingly handsome local sheriff Callum Reade meets Meg, kindling sparks of incipient romance. At Vera and Lily’s former residence, Fleur-de-Lis, Meg discovers Lily’s lost diary, which reveals that Virgil impregnated her during an intemperate fling. Fearing Vera’s wrath, Lily accepted a commission to paint a mural for a convent, St. Lucy’s, which sheltered unwed mothers and orphans. Sixteen years later, having told neither Vera nor Virgil that she gave birth, Lily retrieved her daughter, Ivy St. Clare, from St. Lucy’s orphanage and brought the girl to Arcadia as her “protégée.” So that explains why now-ancient Ivy is the school’s dean, but not why she is so tightly wound and always skulking around spying on people. Given the early introduction of a convenient cliff and a changeling motif, one can expect many cliffhangers and switched babies, and in this Goodman does not disappoint. The denouement, however, will leave many readers baffled.
Passably engaging, principally for its meditations on the ever-shifting challenges facing women artists.Pub Date: March 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-345-49753-6
Page Count: 366
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2009
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
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