A finely crafted story about late-in-life regrets.
Frahmann’s (The Devil’s Analyst, 2016, etc.) novel tells the story of several lives intersecting at an elaborate outdoor dinner.
Teddy Massetti, 69, has spent nearly his entire life on his family’s ranch on the central California coast, where he raises beef cattle and abalone. There’s usually few people at the ranch, but that’s about to change with a one-day event called the Long Table Dinner: “a pop-up restaurant for one night only, marked by a long table that would snake through the farm and…a menu specific to the region and that specific purveyor.” The solitary Teddy, who keeps his emotions close to his vest, is highly anxious about the arrival of 200 strangers, even if he did agree to the event last year. For him, it was an excuse to invite his old, semiestranged friends Jessica and Frank back to the ranch. The couple—Teddy’s former babysitter and her boyfriend—were once like surrogate parents to him, but there’s long been tension between them. Other participants include a chef whom Teddy knew as a boy who’s now trying to impress his next-door neighbor and a tech genius to whom Teddy sold half his ranch; this transaction, in turn, destroyed Teddy’s relationship with his sister. There’s also a couple who blame Frank, a general in the first Gulf War, for a tragedy and a young caterer with a mysterious past. Teddy hopes the dinner will be a chance to start anew—but has too much time already been lost? Throughout this novel, Frahmann’s prose is finely attuned to minute details: “There is a string of cursing. Frank figures it has to be the chef, who has no idea how his cursing can skip up the hill with the wind. The sounds break the mood.” Teddy is shown to be a wonderfully complex character who’s alternately infuriating and captivating—which is all the more impressive given how little he actually speaks over the course of the narrative. The novel luxuriates in rarified pleasures—culinary delicacies, expensive wine, and clifftop beauty, purchased at $250 a plate—while also ruminating deeply on the hollowness of life and how easily time can be lost to inaction.
A finely crafted story about late-in-life regrets.Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-578-42994-6
Page Count: 250
Publisher: Loon Town Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 26, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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