Solid, well-honed entertainment.
A treatise on love and culture, set against the backdrop of the new, hip Miami, explores the lives of four Latinas.
Alternating chapters reveal the four friends, mostly in English and occasionally in Spanish, constantly struggling for happiness in a world of conflicting demands. Isabel, marking four years of celibacy since divorcing her Anglo husband, has retreated into work and raising her two teenaged boys. Her younger cousin Mercy, on the other hand, seems bent on exhausting the Miami market for eligible Cuban men. Meanwhile, their elegant friend Lucinda finds herself suffocating in the mansion and the rigid social life purchased by her husband's Dominican family; and Julia, a successful writer and academic, wavers as to whether she should continue a relationship with her near-perfect boyfriend. Slowly the individual stories proceed, the friends talk about each other and occasionally get together for heart-to-heart conversations regarding the latest development, or just life in general. Fate deals Lucinda the hardest blow when she finds her once loving husband has become an adulterer. She leaves him, but the ties of la familia are harder to break; Lucinda discovers that neither she nor her husband actually owns anything. At the same time, her three friends find love in the making: Isabel is being wooed against all odds (though she resists her unexpected good fortune); Mercy, after finally giving up the husband-hunt to build herself a real-estate empire, then meets her Romeo; and Julia falls in love with a woman—and passion, and life. Though there’s plenty of plot, first-novelist Medina focuses on examining relationships as she offers a homey study of four women simultaneously battling and embracing their culture.
Solid, well-honed entertainment.Pub Date: July 5, 2000
ISBN: 0-446-52448-4
Page Count: 368
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2000
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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