Doty's follow-up to What She Told Him (1984) and Fly Away Home (1982) is the strange but compelling tale of a woman who attracts her lovers through the stories she tells—alluring fiction in the urban-gothic tradition, as brilliantly controlled as it is entrancing. For years, Ben Hastings has enjoyed the good life in Manhattan as a top executive and heir to his father's investment firm, with a beautiful wife and house in suburban Long Island. His perfect routine is disrupted, however, the day his father collapses on an upper Manhattan street, suffers a stroke, and winds up in a coma in a hospital bed. While visiting his father, Ben notices the hovering presence of a mysterious white-haired woman and experiences a compelling urge to learn her identity. When he manages to surprise her at his father's bedside, she tells him her name is Dorothea, and then begins the first of a series of dreamy, gothic-style stories whose mystery and wonder draw Ben first to her Manhattan apartment and, eventually, to her bed. So entranced does Ben become by Dorothea's accounts of her peripatetic childhood in New York, Paris, and the English countryside, her decadent, aristocratic parents, and her frequent encounters with death in its many guises that the investment banker begins to neglect both his business and his former, arid life in the suburbs. Even the discovery that Dorothea was his father's longtime mistress—a fact Ben has suspected all along—fails to discourage him from selling the business after the patriarch's death, deserting his wife, and moving into Dorothea's womb-like home. Whether or not the tales she spins are true is beside the point—it's the potency of the storyteller's imagination that holds Ben captive, and the power of letting go is hers alone. Masterful writing that itself enthralls the reader and leaves one wanting more.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-684-19287-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: April 25, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1991
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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