Shamelessly sentimental, although many will fall for Hyde’s tidy, quick-going, mannerist paragraphs.
Hyde perfects the heart-string-pulling techniques of Pay It Forward (2000), this time in a story about a WWII soldier reincarnated in the body of a free-spirited 21-year-old California man who tracks down the soldier’s now elderly old buddy and best girl—to humorous, romantic effect.
“Usually when the hero dies the story is over,” Walter Crowley says in his gee-gosh manner in the first chapter. Walter is a dead WWII hero from Ocean City, New Jersey, who enlisted in 1942 with his best buddy from high school, Andrew Whittaker, and gained a posthumous Purple Heart for bravery. Except that 40 years later Walter is “stuck” in the spirit world, he tells us, harboring grudges and feeling undeserving of his Purple Heart because of the cowardice he exhibited during that moment of crisis. Walter haunts a pot-smoking, sax-playing kid—Michael Steeb—to get him to contact the original Andrew, now in his 60s and living in Albuquerque, in order to set straight the true story behind Walter’s death in Guadalcanal—and to find out how Andrew had the gumption to marry Walter’s fetching red-haired fiancée, Mary Ann. Michael Steeb learns that he carries all of Walter’s memories, and the ones from Walter’s courtship of Mary Ann four decades before induce Michael to fall in love with her all over again, causing enormous havoc within the aged and bitter Andrew and various onlookers who are horrified at the sight of a sixtysomething lady kissing a mere kid. However absurd the premise, Hyde hooks her reader through artless evocation of an earlier, innocent, patriotic era à la Our Town. “I’d like to tell you that I properly appreciated every single moment of the life I was given,” Walter says, echoing the wholesome goodness of almost everyone here.
Shamelessly sentimental, although many will fall for Hyde’s tidy, quick-going, mannerist paragraphs.Pub Date: April 10, 2002
ISBN: 0-684-86723-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2002
Contemporary ghost yarn from the author of Giant Bones (1997), etc. Thirteen-year-old Jenny Gluckstein leaves New York with her mother, Sally, to live with her new family, English stepfather Evan and stepbrothers Tony and Julian, in bucolic Dorset, England. Agricultural biologist Evan will invigorate a rundown farm and fix up its huge, dilapidated old manor house. Meanwhile, Jenny seethes with resentment at the unwelcome relocation—until she discovers that the house is haunted by a mischievous boggart. Next, her beloved Mister Cat finds his way up to the closed-off third floor, returning with a ghost cat that only Jenny can see! She talks things over with the boggart, then banishes him with a gift of reading spectacles. Up on the third floor, Jenny meets the ghost of Tamsin Willoughby, who died aged 20 more than 300 years ago. In Tamsin’s company, Jenny meets other supernatural creatures: the shapeshifting, untrustworthy Pooka, the ominous Black Dog, the billy-blind with his badly timed good advice—and the terrifying Wild Hunt screaming across the sky. Slowly, talking with local historians, drawing out Tamsin’s recollections, Jenny pieces together a tragic story that hinges on the 17th-century Monmouth rebellion and its aftermath, the bloody reprisals exacted by Judge Jeffries. But what dreadful secret binds the ghosts of Tamsin and her innocent sweetheart together with the Judge’s horrid, monomaniacal shade—and the terrible Wild Hunt itself? An appealing intermingling of history, folklore, and the supernatural, but no real chills or tension—and lively young Jenny simply overwhelms everybody else.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-451-45763-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: ROC/Penguin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1999
Mostert manages it all quite impressively, concocting an intellectual puzzler that will keep the reader hooked, and...
Black cats, snakes, spiders, mystical signs and symbols and dangerous sex are skillfully stirred together in this brain-squeezing thriller from the South African–born author (The Midnight Side, 2001, etc.).
Following an arresting Prologue, which describes an eerie, fateful seduction, Mostert introduces her protagonist, Gabriel Blackstone, a 30-something Londoner who has turned his psychic “gift” into a thriving career as an “information thief.” When we meet him, he’s employing his talent for “remote viewing” (i.e., the ability to enter other people’s thoughts) by spying for a toy company on its competitor. Then Gabriel is contacted by wealthy investment banker William Whittington, and importuned to find the latter’s missing son Robbie, a request seconded by Whittington’s young wife, the former Cecily Franck, herself a remote viewer, and Gabriel’s former lover. When Gabriel “slams a ride” (telepathically) into an unidentified fourth party’s consciousness, he “visits” a mysteriously furnished mansion where “a nightmarish whirlwind of images and sounds” comprises a scene similar to that in the Prologue, and also to the interior of Monk House in Chelsea (which Gabriel visits), home of the alluring, eccentric sisters Minnaloushe and Morrigan, known to have been Robbie Whittington’s “close friends.” Meanwhile, interpolated diary entries kept by “M.” tease the reader with the possibility—gravely considered by the increasingly involved and baffled Gabriel—that one or both of the sisters has committed murder. Whether or not they are (as alleged) “direct descendants” of Elizabethan magus John Dee, both are absorbed in the arcana of astrology, hermetic philosophy, alchemy, witchcraft and the Renaissance art of constructing “memory palaces”—one of which, once entered, holds the key to the Monk mystery, and leads to an inordinately creepy finale whose working-out will cast a dark shadow over the rest of Gabriel’s life.
Mostert manages it all quite impressively, concocting an intellectual puzzler that will keep the reader hooked, and guessing, until the final page.Pub Date: April 5, 2007
ISBN: 0-525-95003-6
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2007
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