Wilson’s ambition to be a memorable satirist of pop culture is thwarted by her high-decibel prose: she needs to bring the...
Overwrought debut of a teenager’s messy attempts to achieve showbiz celebrity.
Wilson has debunked the cult of celebrity before, in her equally overwrought essay collection A Massive Swelling (2000). Here, the prime culprit is Peppy Normal, whose showbiz aspirations haven’t taken her beyond a topless juggling act in Reno. The movie Fame is an eye-opener, and Peppy’s mission now is to propel her two kids to stardom. Ned proves a lost cause but Liza is more malleable, though hardly more talented. We first see her looking like an “underage sex-clown” as she auditions for a TV commercial. It’s the early 1980s, and Peppy has moved the family into an abandoned firehouse in the Bay Area, ideal for amateur theatricals—the opening production of Sound of Music is so abysmal it becomes a camp hit. Meanwhile, Liza, loud, unstable and seriously uncool, is struggling with high school. Early on, she will willingly lose her virginity to her classroom tormentor in a supply closet. Wilson’s idea is to put Liza through the wringer, and she does it in prose that lurches from one gaudy hyperbole to another. Liza develops a monster-size crush on ChoCho, a Superfly drug dealer who might, in her addled judgment, be her stairway to the stars. Even though she drops out, the scenes she moves on to are high school writ large: drugs, cliques, insecurities. That goes both for the Haight, where she has a bad acid trip while living with would-be elves, and for Tinseltown, where she betrays her friends and tries to kill herself (like Peppy, years before). Her lack of autonomy might not matter if Wilson brought a fresh eye to these familiar venues, but she really doesn’t. She does ease up on Liza, however, allowing her a successful act in Vegas as “an icon of camp depravity.”
Wilson’s ambition to be a memorable satirist of pop culture is thwarted by her high-decibel prose: she needs to bring the volume down, way down.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2004
ISBN: 0-00-715460-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 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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