The voice is remarkable, but there is too much padding of what is a rather slight story.
Hodgen (Hello, I Must Be Going, 2006, etc.) has structured this novel as a series of “elegies” that a young woman addresses to five major, if occasionally inadvertent influences in her life.
The first, most deeply felt elegy—to Mary Murphy’s Uncle Michael (1952-89)—describes Mary’s less-than-stable New England childhood in the 1970s and ’80s. When her strikingly beautiful mother Margaret, who changes men frequently, lets Michael move in between husbands, he takes on an outsized fatherly role in Mary’s life. But when he moves away, he slips out of Mary and her family’s life all too easily and permanently. In this section, Hodgen creates several fully realized, heartbreaking histories in small, indelible strokes. The subsequent elegies lack the same impact. Elwood LePoer (1971-90) is a classmate of Mary’s before he drops out of high school to work on cars and dies at 19 in a freak accident. He is a loser whom Mary barely knows. His importance is a matter of coincidence—his unwillingness to give Mary’s sister Malinda a ride while she is hitchhiking with Mary and Margaret causes Margaret to meet her fourth husband, the saintly black man Walter, who becomes Mary’s mentor. Carson Washington (1972-93) is Mary’s roommate during her freshman year in college. The girls bond as outsiders on scholarship. The fourth elegy also concerns a person Mary knows only briefly. James Butler (1952-96) is a Juilliard-trained piano player whom Mary meets in Maine while looking for Malinda, who has disappeared. He hides his kindness behind his wit and makes sure Mary attends grad school. When he dies of AIDS, she inherits his musical compositions. In the final elegy, for Margaret, Mary ends up adopting Malinda’s abandoned son and making peace with her much-married mother before Margaret’s death.
The voice is remarkable, but there is too much padding of what is a rather slight story.Pub Date: July 19, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-393-06140-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2010
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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