A female grad student's coming-of-age tale, and a work so charming, wise, and self-assured it's hard to believe it's a first novel—by a Massachusetts author discovered at a Bennington writers' workshop. Josie Trask has been a student in English lit long enough to have married, given birth to a son, and mothered him for three years—all without yet having finished her dissertation. Perhaps it's her dissertation's subject that fails to motivate: a virtually unknown 19th-century woman poet from Josie's hometown of Chester, Mass., whose work might not be worth resurrecting. Then again, the irritating success of Josie's husband, Peter, might be the real problem. Having never experienced writer's block, Peter has sailed through his teaching gigs on the popular culture of the '60s, has been awarded a book contract for his own dissertation (From the Valley of the Dolls to the Ballad of the Green Berets), and is now planning to spend the summer in Berkeley drilling college students on the significance of '60s icons. Josie expects to accompany him until she's offered a summer job as researcher for glitzy, lowbrow British biographer Fiona Jones, who's doing a quick posthumous bio of Jackie Onassis. Unable to resist the $10,000, Josie takes the job and devotes herself to investigating JFK's love affairs and Jackie's terrible sorrows—only half-consciously suspecting that Peter may be doing his own philandering in Berkeley all the while. As the weeks pass, Jackie's triumphs and travails as a wife and mother begin eerily to resemble Josie's own—but happily, by the end of the summer, both feisty heroines manage to triumph in the face of adversity by winning the respect of their husbands, forging forward in their careers, and lavishing affection on their lucky kids. As first novels go, this one's a plum.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-684-83077-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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