Galef’s second (Flesh, 1995) is about a young American who goes abroad to find himself, in a novel that’s likely to sweep readers up only sporadically. Cricket Collins (his mother, who died when he was a boy, named him) is 22 when he gains his father’s disapproval by deferring law school and going to Japan instead to teach English (mainly to businessmen). Once he’s there, things aren—t propitious for those who want to like a book’s protagonist, since Cricket seems shallow and callow at once’so hostile, for example, toward the kindly but admittedly maternal dorm mother (where he first lives) that he turns to petty thievery as a way to offend her and change things. It’s gradually revealed that something deeper must be amiss with Cricket—an emotional scar left by his mother’s death? He stays in Japan far longer than he—d intended, begins learning the language in earnest, even finds a girlfriend, named Reiko—with whom (as with anyone, except himself), we discover, he can never reach orgasm, though this is a secret he lets nobody know. —Craziness and cancer,— Cricket’s father told him, run in the family—and Cricket’s attempt to escape the latter gets so curiously lost amid the steadily, slowly, ongoingly amassed details of life in Japan that the reader has little sight of purpose or of focus on the quest, sensing only the waiting, not even clearly for what. There are customs, cooking, eating, shopping, teaching, the half-marooned doings of other expats. Only very late does the novel try to declare and seize its theme (as when Cricket’s health falls apart, in a riveting trip to China), but even then there’s little sense of an organic unity—as opposed to a unity of convenience—between travelogue on the one hand and psychological journey on the other. Ambitious work, though place and person remain merely congruent, not welded, with an unsatisfying inertness as the result.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 1-57962-010-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Permanent Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
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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