Parody of Christian filmmaking that promises more than it delivers. Prill's earlier satires (Serial Killer Days, 1996, etc.) also had thoroughly worked-out premises that misfired. Lights! Camera! Salvation! is the cry of Good Samaritan's The Quiet Hour, a muzzy, lamb's-wool series that has fallen in sales as the success of films by its new rival in inspirational moviemaking, Blood of the Lamb Theater, grows. BOL offers shock Christian movies about blood and abortion, with dripping medical inserts of raw fetuses. To be sure, Good Samaritan once made Christian horror films, such as I Was a Christian Frankenstein and The Baptism of Dracula (the only vampire movie without a single drop of blood being spilled), but producer Noah Foster Speck gave those up as fads. Now, though, his son Leviticus has a problem: His movie column for Christian Bus Driver magazine has been dumped, and CBD's editor has taken on a new assistant, fresh college graduate Nicholas Puckett, who's written a novel worth turning into an inspirational film. Is Good Samaritan interested? Leviticus reads Nick's The Fetal Detective and knows instantly that it's too strong for The Quiet Hour. He also knows, however, that if BOL ever gets hold of this Spillane-like antiabortionist thriller, they'll bury Good Samaritan Films forever. So Leviticus lies, telling Nick that Good Samaritan will film Fetal Detective, featuring none other than Rance Jericho, the former King of Christian Cinema (now too old to play Our Lord) as the Fetal Detective. Rance is looking for work now that the young, wayward Ricky Bible has taken over the job of portraying Jesus. Ricky, by the way, has also found time to impregnate Noah's daughter Evie. Will Evie's fetus somehow fall under the purview of the Fetal Detective if she chooses the needle over natural birth? Must one be as bitter a gargoyle as Waugh to make Christian satire rise above blandness? Only saintly smiles here, no belly laughs.
Pub Date: March 17, 1998
ISBN: 0-312-18173-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 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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