Rises above the downbeat first half to offer a believable, honest and observant portrait of a woman who gets what she wants...
In former TV writer Shaw’s debut, a series of connected stories with Los Angeles as a supporting character, a transplanted New Yorker finds herself adrift in La-La Land after her marriage goes south.
When reporter Lacey Brennan, “on the cusp of her thirties,” meets Toby in a Manhattan comedy club, she feels like her grown-up life has begun at last. He’s sweet and funny, and after a whirlwind bicoastal courtship she joins him in California, where he is a staff writer for a late-night TV show. Insecure Lacey overlooks many signals that they might not be well suited for each other, and after the wedding things unravel quickly. Toby loses his job and spends his days in front of the television in a pot-fueled haze while she supports them working as an assistant on a TV show. Eager to salvage their relationship and avoid a divorce like the one that tore apart her own family, Lacey turns to couples therapy, but Toby leaves her anyway. Depressed and lonely in a city that doesn’t feel like home, she throws herself into an ill-advised affair and numerous casual hook-ups. Her soul-searching (and some therapy) leads her back to a traumatic childhood in which her mother was forced to choose her new husband over Lacey and her twin brother Sam. Realizing that lingering unresolved issues are holding her back, Lacey stages an intervention with her parents and Sam, a plan complicated by the fact that Sam has been missing for years. Meanwhile, Lacey’s improved confidence attracts a new suitor who, wouldn’t you know it, appears right after she decides to move back to New York for good.
Rises above the downbeat first half to offer a believable, honest and observant portrait of a woman who gets what she wants only after giving up what she thought she needed.Pub Date: April 21, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6770-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2009
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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