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LONESOME STANDARD TIME

A backwoods village becomes hell on earth in Jennings's (Mosquito Games, 1989, Women of Granite, 1992) newest heavy-handed saga of bleak prospects and endlessly battered souls in up-country New Hampshire. Along the Whispering Turnpike, a dead-end road whose culminating mountain of gravel is a favorite of suicide drivers, Hank Rodgers makes his way home. After 15 years away from Hunt's Station, he finds that it and its inhabitants have taken a turn for the worse. The ubiquitous toxic dumps of Hunt Waste Management have fouled earth, air, and heart, leaving all in their vicinity (except the ravens and crows, which thrive) at death's door. Hank's return lightens the gloom: He fans the desire of 17-year-old Maggie Parriss, the last child born in town, to leave and not look back; he rekindles the passion of his ex-lover Clare Hunt, daughter of the evil dump-owner turned invalid and recluse; he plays the prodigal son to his bitter, wasted, banjo-wizard father, who for years has mesmerized Hunt's Station with his woeful, wailing country music but has recently used his banjo to bash in the skull of a reporter snooping around the town's subterranean fires and open pits. Hank brings matters to a head, though, when he takes Dad's old souped-up Pontiac down the Turnpike to challenge his own demons and in the process runs over Dirty Willy, the company foreman/hitman, who crawls back to his boss's biggest pit, sets himself ablaze, and jumps in, knowing that the ensuing conflagration will consume everything. Hank joins the survivors, but his father pays the price for his crime, joining old man Hunt in waiting for the flames to release them. Making a virtue of the absence of subtlety seems to be Jennings's m.o., but this willfully overwritten story, like his others, is in this case both overwrought and ludicrous: a cartoon- novel in which the effects are as striking as they are strikingly superficial. (Author tour)

Pub Date: March 1, 1996

ISBN: 0-15-100188-X

Page Count: 176

Publisher: Harcourt

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1995

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THE CATCHER IN THE RYE

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

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MAGIC HOUR

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

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