A disappointment, considering the chatty, amiable spirit of the first.
A sequel to the likable Ladies with Options (2001) finds a group of older women becoming financial wizards.
Fifteen years ago, the Larksdale (Minnesota) Ladies made a few small investments in franchised retail stores and ended up owners of the town’s largest manufacturer (and saving the town). Now, in 1999, that same business, Prairie Machine Tools, or PMT, is worth a bundle, and things like Silicon Valley and “IPO” are as familiar to the Ladies as strudel and rhododendron. When a New York multimedia company offers to buy PMT, a deal promising to make millionaires out of a good portion of the town, the Ladies think it may be too good to be true. The story is told mostly by young Callie, a project manager at PMT and the niece of one of the original Larksdale Ladies. Not having been with the company long enough to cash in on the ensuing payday, Callie—with her friends and co-workers Traci, a lawyer, and Vince, the company’s resident genius—while away the months watching their little town turn into a gauche version of Beverly Hills. And the Ladies were right: the big buyout was a bad idea. Not only is everyone spending on the promise of future stock-value, but Sophia and her husband Milt, PMT’s former CEO, are breaking up under the pressure. And of course the reader knows what’s really on the horizon: the bursting of the tech bubble that will turn all those millionaires into unemployed paupers. Can the Larksdale Ladies save the day? Will Vince’s new invention bring back PMT? The strength of Hartwick’s debut lay in its odd cast of characters working in a fish-out-of-water environment and succeeding beyond their dreams. This follow-up puts character (and the Ladies) on the back burner and describes business plans, legal matters, and the minutia of creating a start-up.
A disappointment, considering the chatty, amiable spirit of the first.Pub Date: April 6, 2004
ISBN: 0-425-19421-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these...
Figuratively and literally shattering moments of hoRRRRRipilication in Chamberlain, Maine where stones fly from the sky rather than from the hands of the villagers (as they did in "The Lottery," although the latter are equal to other forms of persecution).
All beginning when Carrie White discovers a gift with telekinetic powers (later established as a genetic fact), after she menstruates in full ignorance of the process and thinks she is bleeding to death while the other monsters in the high school locker room bait and bully her mercilessly. Carrie is the only child of a fundamentalist freak mother who has brought her up with a concept of sin which no blood of the Lamb can wash clean. In addition to a sympathetic principal and gym teacher, there's one girl who wishes to atone and turns her date for the spring ball over to Carrie who for the first time is happy, beautiful and acknowledged as such. But there will be hell to pay for this success—not only her mother but two youngsters who douse her in buckets of fresh-killed pig blood so that Carrie once again uses her "wild talent," flexes her mind and a complete catastrophe (explosion and an uncontrolled fire) virtually destroys the town.
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these youngsters who once ate peanut butter now scrawl "Carrie White eats shit." But as they still say around here, "Sit a spell and collect yourself."Pub Date: April 8, 1974
ISBN: 0385086954
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1974
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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