A tender, if disjointed, account of a dysfunctional British family.
A debut novel delivers a family drama set in England in the years immediately following World War II.
Elizabeth Borge was working at a U.S. air base in England in the late 1940s when she met Lonnie Caradine, an American technical sergeant who quickly swept her off her feet. Lonnie gets her pregnant—twice—and promises to marry her, but returns to the U.S. and eventually admits that he is already wed to another. Then Beth becomes pregnant again; the father is a married man named Carl. In a fit of depressive despair, she attempts to kill herself by swallowing a swarm of pills, but she survives, as does her third child, Natalie. Beth finds herself charged with a bevy of crimes, including the attempted murder of her unborn daughter. Beth’s mother, Mary, with whom she suffers a historically strained relationship, helps her secure a lawyer and successfully solicit a letter from President Dwight D. Eisenhower and the Air Force. They admit Lonnie’s parentage of two children and guarantee his financial support, allowing Beth to elude jail time. While she recovers in a hospital, her son, Steven, and her first daughter, Lizzie, live with Mary and adjust to a new home and routine. Once Beth is released, she and her mother convert a portion of Mary’s home into a boardinghouse. They first rent to a rowdy Irish family that withholds payment until the two take legal action, and then to an Indian man, Dan Patel, whom Beth eventually marries. Sherouse bases her touching novel on her own life and adopts shifting perspectives. She recounts the action sometimes through Beth’s eyes and sometimes from the vantage point of Mary or Lizzie, a fictional device that is by turns epistemologically intriguing and a bit confusing. The author’s artistic range is considerable—she hits lightheartedly jocose notes with the same aplomb that she depicts the grimly serious, like Lizzie’s sexual abuse at the hands of Patel. But the plot can get bogged down in the humdrum depiction of quotidian affairs—the book often seems to be a memoir-like catalog of events rather than a dramatic novel—and as a result the pace can be slack.
A tender, if disjointed, account of a dysfunctional British family.Pub Date: Jan. 29, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-976975-13-4
Page Count: 232
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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