A cozy, if sentimental read for a brisk autumn afternoon, or anytime you’re in need of a little charm with your tea.
Homespun parables about life, the universe and lots of other things from a wise old storyteller’s perspective.
Part Walton’s Mountain, part Tobacco Road, Belik’s debut story collection evokes a mythic past of the not-so-easy life in the byways of rural America. Of the four short fictional tales featured here, three seem to be set in the days of the Great Depression, while the other evokes that troubled period with vintage cars and a similarly period-style hobo jaunt along the tarmac. With pluck, faith and what used to be called “heart,” Belik’s heroes somehow get by–some even prosper. The books opens with the rather shaggy parable of an unfortunately named lad, one John Van Groot Jones III, who proves his mettle to the older, tougher boys at Clay Orphan’s Home by riding down a steep ravine inside a unused iron furnace. For better or worse, it could be an episode of The Little Rascals. The second is a droll yarn about an “ordinary boy” with an extraordinary first name, Ichyomous, and his equally esoteric skill at long-distance cherry-pit spitting. Fame and fortune and, naturally, the girl of his teenage dreams are his until homework intervenes…and his life returns to its uneventful former state. The collection’s highpoint is Belik’s panoramic third story, “Over the Blue Ridge Parkway in an Antique Car,” in which a pair of gentlemen, perhaps adult versions of his young protagonists, set off on a very leisurely 1,000-mile road trip in a speed-challenged ’25 Dodge–its wry realism rings truer than the other stories’ somewhat easy nostalgia and tendency toward cornpone. The final tale, a tearjerker set in the coal mines of Southern Illinois, concerns a stoic immigrant miner quietly grieving for his two dead young sons. But this story is seriously hampered by stock-character dialogue written in implausible dialect. A short, folksy lyric poem, the Pete Seeger-ish “Why,” forms a brief coda to Belik’s tragicomic, moralistic narratives.
A cozy, if sentimental read for a brisk autumn afternoon, or anytime you’re in need of a little charm with your tea.Pub Date: Sept. 25, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4392-0368-2
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
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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