Plot and prose overload, with shades of Alice Sebold’s Lovely Bones.
Southern novelist Fowler (Staircase of a Thousand Steps, 2001, etc.) tries for the profound and moving as she tells of a good woman and friend whose sudden death provokes big questions.
Florida-set, the story is an awkward mix of mystery, gothic ghoul, and politically correct attitudes. A cobbled patchwork of different voices includes those of a transsexual and former Marine troubled by his Vietnam experience; a doctor whose wife recently died from breast cancer; a bad-boy novelist; and the dead Murmur Lee Harp. And the tale they tell is so heavy with foreshadowing that the mystery of Murmur Lee’s death is soon apparent—despite all the purple ink (“I become an ocean tippling in the cupped petals of a morning glory,” etc.). On New Year’s Eve 2001, Murmur Lee, a divorced healer and bar-owner, joins her new lover, novelist Billy Speare, on his boat on the river. They drink and listen to music, but suddenly, when Billy puts on a new and unusual CD, Murmur Lee falls into the dark river and drowns. While Murmur Lee adjusts to being dead, her friends gather in Iris Haven, Murmur’s hometown, to mourn her: among them are the transsexual Edith Piaf, former Marine; Dr. Z, who loved both his wife Katrina and Murmur; Lucinda, a Mennonite artist who also loved Murmur but from a distance; and Charleston Rowena Mudd, a childhood friend who leaves Harvard to join the mourners in Iris Haven. Free in death to visit both past and present, Murmur discovers that she’s a product of a rape, which helps explain her father’s coolness and her mother’s religiosity; revisits her own ecstatic religious experiences, eventually diagnosed as a rare form of epilepsy; recalls how her marriage broke up when her husband couldn’t deal with their small daughter’s fatal leukemia; learns how an ancestor came to give Iris Haven its name, and watches her friends grieve—and move on.
Plot and prose overload, with shades of Alice Sebold’s Lovely Bones.Pub Date: Jan. 11, 2005
ISBN: 0-385-49981-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2004
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
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