Lovely descriptions of India in a presentation that, still, may puzzle as much as reward.
Bacon’s second novel (following Lost Geography, 2000), set in the early ’90s, meanders along to India with a recently separated New Yorker who delves with strenuous purpose into the history of her English-Indian mother’s upbringing.
Mid-30s Anna craves an adventurous change after her husband of five years, architect Mark, leaves her for a younger woman. Yet venturing to India for Anna is something like a betrayal to her tall, awkward mother Rose, who was raised motherless by her scientist father in Calcutta and was eventually sent back to England, in the mid-1940s, under shadowy circumstances. Stern, dispassionate, English Rose has brought up her own two children, Anna and James, now grown and productive citizens, with their American doctor father David in Concord, Massachusetts, never looking back to the Old Country, which she repudiated as being dull and difficult. Yet Anna, a nonprofit writer, armed with a journal Rose has written for her, finds enormous vibrancy in India as she travels from Delhi to Varanasi to Calcutta—such as meeting a younger Israeli man, Lev, whom Anna may or may not pursue, and stepping in to help some young foreign travelers after one of them has died after being hit by a car. Bacon introduces incidentally (and not always with logical organization) numerous subtexts—for example, Anna's desire for a child as one of the reasons for the collapse of her marriage, a desire that, indeed, resonates with her mother’s early story. Still, on the whole, the novel doesn’t coalesce, since most of the interesting action, both in Rose’s past and in Anna's failed marriage, has already happened. Immediate dramatization is missing, though Bacon does preserve a decorous tone in pretty sentences and expert characterization—as in the portrayal of Rose’s fierce, suspect, childhood servant Ayah. Admirably, the author resists handing up a predictable denouement—instead letting her tale find its own recalcitrant way.
Lovely descriptions of India in a presentation that, still, may puzzle as much as reward.Pub Date: April 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-374-28185-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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