Brittle and talky.
Single mother falls for someone else’s husband, in British author Alliott’s US debut.
Beloved Ned died en route to the birthing room, crashing into a lorry and departing this world just as their newborn son entered it with the umbilical cord wrapped around his neck (little Max was simply blue, imagine that). After four years of consuming loneliness, alleviated only by the commonsensical support of her dearest friend and stints at her mother’s antiques shop in Portobello Road, isn’t it time Lucy allowed herself a little fun? So what if the fun happens to be married to another woman? Charles, a writer of some renown for the BBC (worthwhile programmes, darling), is so extraordinarily attractive, and his wife is apparently a religious fanatic. How appalling; no wonder he’s forced to look elsewhere for female companionship. Lucy is fed up with being conspicuously noble and inwardly forlorn. She deeply regrets her decision to move out to the country with Ned’s ghastly parents, who keep his cricket bats on the walls of their splendid mansion and chat about him as if he were still alive. She has to talk to someone, and why not Charles? She does experience teeny-tiny twinges of conscience, but after all, everyone sleeps with everyone else sooner or later these days, and it doesn’t mean too terribly much, does it? A comic tryst in Charles’s London apartment, however, goes dreadfully awry when his eight-year-old daughter appears. The only answer to her what-are-you-doing question is, well, wrestling. Up pop those bloody doubts again, running around the edge of Lucy’s consciousness like alcoholic hedgehogs at a garden party. Hugely annoying. And her unspeakably dreary mother-in-law is making all sorts of wild accusations and generally behaving badly. Is it possible that Charles has misled her, perhaps even exaggerated his wife’s religious fervor?
Brittle and talky.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-46280-7
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2003
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
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