Brave and accomplished.
Short-story author Eldridge (Unkempt, 2005) gives distinctive voice to six very different characters in her challenging debut novel.
Joyce is a curator whose abrasive personality is a perfect match for her provocative art shows. Elegant, beautiful Bobbie, her first-year roommate at Barnard, is now a gynecologist and still Joyce’s best friend. Bobbie’s patient Lisa, Joyce’s aggrieved ex-assistant, is adjusting to life as a banker’s wife, mother and reformed bad girl. Lisa’s sister Lynne is her temperamental opposite. Lynne’s teenage daughter Jordan, who has always been fascinated by her aunt’s wild ways, is now in trouble herself. Then there’s Adela, Bobbie’s adopted daughter and Joyce’s goddaughter, a young woman whose close relationship with her mother might not survive a big revelation. Each character has a story to tell, and it’s not entirely easy to keep track of these intersecting first-person narratives. Eldridge does not use any typological signs to designate dialogue, and she employs an elliptical style that forces the reader to approach each woman’s story from the outside. It takes a while to fully grasp the various overlapping conflicts that compel the plot, but readers willing to do the work will be rewarded with a rich, emotionally and intellectually engaging experience. Eldridge’s craft enhances the verisimilitude—quotation marks and long passages of exposition tend not to occur in real life—and there’s something exciting about a book that combines technical daring with concerns generally relegated to the nongenre known as “women’s fiction.” The author takes her characters seriously, she takes her work seriously, and she takes her audience seriously too.
Brave and accomplished.Pub Date: June 22, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-15-101101-8
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2009
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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