At shorter length, Stead reveals more clearly her gifts in tone and voice and building a scene, while her theme here puts...
The four novellas of this reissued 1967 book center on young women in the 1940s and '50s seeking to find themselves in a world looking to impose its own definitions.
The enigmatic Honor Lawrence of the title story, age 15 but claiming 18, takes a job in a New York office but dislikes business and seems impossibly naïve until her father’s cruel behavior is revealed. She goes on “long inexplicable wanderings” and reappears in ever worsening condition to the man who hired her and whose wife speaks of how marriage can make a woman feel “like an imbecile in a little room, with no money and no freedom.” In “The Dianas,” Lydia is a vibrant American in the last days of a Paris vacation successfully fending off would-be dates and suitors. She escapes unscathed only to accept something seemingly fine that could be malign. Australian writer Stead, as she did painfully in The Man Who Loved Children (1940), lets a fairy-tale feel last only so long before shifting acutely. Bumptious, loutish men overshadow the two crucial females in “The Rightangled Creek.” One is a wife who does endless chores for her self-important writer husband and their coddled Princeton-bound boy. The other is a 22-year-old, “full of life,” who gets a disease from her guitar-playing do-nothing husband, loses a child and then her mind. “Girl from the Beach” returns to Paris, where Linda of New York has quit the Sorbonne and is surviving on occasional checks from her parents. She enchants a self-involved freelance writer and becomes embroiled in an exquisite comeuppance engineered by his latest ex-wife. Linda seems to bottle up her free spirit and return to an acceptable marriage in the U.S., but the fiance could harbor a threat.
At shorter length, Stead reveals more clearly her gifts in tone and voice and building a scene, while her theme here puts these fictions among the Ur-texts of feminism.Pub Date: May 16, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-925355-71-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Text
Review Posted Online: April 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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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