A spiky story replete with decadence and yet told with an undeniable, unshakable grace.
Rock ’n’ roll girl figures burning out is much, much better than just fading away.
Long before she was fronting the international rock sensation Anaconda, Lee Annis was a young wife stuck in Vegas, married to a gun-collecting doctor, with a newborn she barely acknowledged. Of course, nobody knows that, though some media wags have posited that the color of her nipples, which can be seen quite clearly on an album cover, prove that she had once had a child. Nowadays, Lee does what she can as a member of the international rock-star jet set to burn out the memory of that existence, along with a windswept, hazily described Montana childhood. Never one for leaving things alone, Lee sleeps with and then tortures herself thinking about what-could-have-been with bandmate Billy, who’s actually with another bandmate, Alessia, but decides eventually to marry a third girl. So, after a brief interlude that gives some unresolved background on the whole Vegas/child thing, Lee spends a good many pages mooning about London and Los Angeles, thinking about Billy and the band’s imminent demise, and being generally, fabulously, self-destructive. Although binging on random, greedy sex, she knows it has to end, and soon: “This cock-to-mouth existence is doing me in.” But Lee is compulsive, if nothing else, stuck in Möbius strip loop of rage, sex, and desire for an unattainable peaceful existence (which, if she was ever given, she’d most likely toss over in a second). The only things sustaining her are the “analgesics of sex and drugs and shopping” and the near-volcanic upwellings of heartache that keep propelling her forward into the void. Irish second-novelist Collins (Cannibals, 2003) lets Lee tell her story in all its dark star fury, just swan-diving into her mangled psyche and not trying to shoehorn it into the typical rise-and-decline rock-star/addict narrative.
A spiky story replete with decadence and yet told with an undeniable, unshakable grace.Pub Date: May 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-224-06927-6
Page Count: 250
Publisher: Jonathan Cape/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 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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