From the battlefields of the South to the spas of Europe to the fiery destruction of Coney Island, Bram (Gossip,1997; The...
A deeply felt novel about the “crimes” of love that ultimately brings fresh meaning to that tired phrase “family values.”
Stranded down south at Civil War’s end, orphaned, 16-year-old New Yorker Augustus Fitzwilliam Boyd meets up with Isaac, a soon-to-be-former slave. Heading north, the two pause in an abandoned house with a piano, where Fitz discovers not only his “music of the spheres” (which comes to him automatically at the piano) but his love for Isaac. In New York, Isaac finds work with a Jewish carpenter who has no qualms about his race, while Fitz works as a musician in a brothel. They live together as lovers (under the pretext that the black man is the white’s servant), but Isaac, obsessed with their “sin,” dreams of marrying and having children. When their physical relationship ends, Fitz has an affair with a society gentleman who introduces him to rich socialites longing for word from beyond the grave of their war dead. The act is only partly a con—Fitz truly believes in his otherworldly muse—and the socialites buy into it wholeheartedly. Soon, he takes the more impressive name of Dr. August and with Isaac as his manager embarks for Europe. There, Isaac marries a prim, brittle, white governess, Alice Pangborn, who bears him two children. (Blind, elderly Fitz, dictating to Isaac’s son, is narrating.) After life goes disastrously awry, Isaac, filled with remorse over a tragic household event and guilt over the plight of his race back home, where lynching is epidemic, disappears. Fitz and Alice return to New York—vastly changed since their departure—to live, work, and raise the children together.
From the battlefields of the South to the spas of Europe to the fiery destruction of Coney Island, Bram (Gossip,1997; The Father of Frankenstein, 1995, etc.) conjures up a historical world true to itself, one that lingers in the mind like the final strains of an unforgettable symphony.Pub Date: June 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-688-17569-4
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 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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