Leland (Professor of Aesthetics, 1993, etc.) offers a reprise of the angst and anxieties of the last two decades when three disparate but representative characters look back as the body of a longtime friend is brought home to be buried. Taking place in the days before and after the funeral of Bobbo Starwick, missing in Vietnam for nearly 30 years, three people interweave memories of him with accounts of their own lives since he disappeared. Belva, who was Bobbo's first lover in high school, and Fred, a fellow Vietnam vet and Bobbo's high-school friend, still live in Rhymer's Creek, West Virginia. Barry, the third member of the trio, is Bobbo's gay half-brother, who fled the town 20 years ago for New York. Bobbo was one of those golden boys whom everybody loves: the perfect brother, friend, and lover. But something happened to him in Vietnam. Fred, who saw him there, observed the change, as did his parents when they met him in Hawaii: The war had taken over and Bobbo had become a ferocious killer. Fred himself has never recovered from the war: He can't hold down a job, is troubled by nightmares and, by the day of the funeral, is so undone by memories of the war that he has to be hospitalized. Businesswoman Belva, wanting something more out of life, hitched up with a rich classmate from Tennessee, but the marriage soon broke down and she married safe and dependable Wallace, who doesn't seem to know that she's had numerous lovers over the years. Barry, who has become a photographer famous for his Mapplethorpe-like shots, recalls his antiwar activities in college, his coming-out in New York, and the loss of the only man he has loved to AIDS. With Bobbo laid to rest, the three finally find some peace of their own. All the highs and lows of those times, revisited by a trio who seem more like stock figures than the scar-bearing bereaved.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-944072-69-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1996
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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