A man's groping attempts to reignite his life are juxtaposed with painful snapshots of political strife in Guatemala—in this energetic but uneven first novel, winner of the Milkweed National Fiction Prize. It's Armando's 30th birthday, and there's scant reason to celebrate. A former student at Harvard Law, he dropped out, divorced his wife, moved back to the Bay Area, and gained 50 pounds. Arriving home, he's startled by a visitor lurking in his stairwell: his college friend Spoon, who announces, ``I've come to save you.'' Anthropologist Spoon is getting married in Guatemala, and he commandeers Armando to be his best man. The bride-to-be is the tranquil but repressed daughter of Hoover Schultz, a capricious coffee grower of tremendous wealth and an old crony of Spoon's father. Once in Guatemala, Armando heads off to run a personal errand in the countryside, where he is kidnapped and humiliated by a band of guerrillas. Meanwhile, Schultz offhandedly allows Spoon to hold an election on one of his plantations: It has a jerry- rigged, let's-play-at-democracy air to it, but one of Spoon's best friends is murdered, perhaps by Schultz's son. Should Spoon cancel the wedding to honor the dead? Formerly passive Armando, released from captivity, presses for a police investigation, but the wedding goes on. Ultimately it's man-of-action Spoon who goes back to Connecticut to become a paper-pushing assistant professor, while dreamy Armando is lost to the wilds of Guatemala. In the terrific early chapters, Schweidel achieves a high-wire intensity: crackling vignettes that resonate with psychological insight. But as his characters descend into the Guatemalan maelstrom, events whiz by, and tautly elegant meditations on helplessness, hope, and loss give way to rushed treks through speed-blurred scenery. An ambitious but hyperkinetic debut.
Pub Date: May 1, 1995
ISBN: 1-57131-004-5
Page Count: 218
Publisher: Milkweed
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1995
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
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