A thoughtful and useful work of self-help tips as fiction.
A debut self-help novel tells the story of two traumatized friends attempting to get past the abuses they suffered as children.
Even though she is a financially successful woman of 35, Anne Davis keeps choosing deadbeat guys. She’s a rescuer: trying to save Derek from his own abusive behavior in the hopes that he’ll finally be well enough to love her back. She knows it stems from some abandonment issues from never having met her father, coupled with the grief she still feels over the death of her son. Knowing where it comes from doesn’t really help, unfortunately. Luckily, Anne has Dominic in her life. He's been her friend for years and undergone his own cycles of bad decision-making before finally becoming a respected counselor. Dominic was molested as a child by a pair of older girls (his babysitters), which greatly informs his sex life and his emotional state as an adult. With the help of Dominic and another old friend, Josie, Anne digs deeper into her life and finds trauma that she wasn’t previously aware of. Even better, they help her to work through that pain in order to stop searching for love from impossible sources and find it within herself. Following the conclusion of the tale, Mason and Andrada provide 40 pages of helpful strategies for people who have found themselves in situations similar to those of Anne and Dominic. The authors write in a buoyant prose that keeps the story peppy and easy to read even in its heavier moments. Sprinkled throughout the dialogue are snippets of self-help ideas that relate to the problems of the characters. “I’ve found there are three types of people,” explains Dominic at one point. “Doers, feelers and thinkers. Doers, like myself, are goal oriented. They don’t have time for emotions. Feelers are driven by emotions. All decisions are based on feelings. Thinkers are driven by logic.” That the novel is written primarily as a teaching aid (rather than for the tale itself) saps it of the urgency readers normally expect in fiction. But the book succeeds in terms of demonstrating the issues and the coping mechanisms advocated by the authors.
A thoughtful and useful work of self-help tips as fiction.Pub Date: Sept. 11, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9978938-2-3
Page Count: 202
Publisher: Seattle Indie Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 31, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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