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BRASS RING

Name: BRASS RING
Author: Diane Chamberlain
ISBN: 0-06-017612-1

by Diane Chamberlain ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 12, 1994

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A swell women's page-turner by Chamberlain (Keeper of the Light, 1992, etc.), in which incest survivors overcome their past and proceed through pain, growth, and mystery toward a syrupy happy ending. As children, Claire and Vanessa Harte spent summers with their grandfather, who carved horses for a real carousel in his barn. Claire has only wonderful memories—in sharp contrast to Vanessa, who was raped in the carousel's green chariot and has led a different existence altogether. Thirty years later, Claire and her husband, Jon Mathias, are an enviable supercouple who head a Virginia rehabilitation foundation. Jon has been in a wheelchair since his teens; it was Claire—with her gift for seeing the silver lining in every gray cloud—who turned his life around. Driving home on a snowy night, they see a young woman poised on the edge of the Harper's Ferry bridge. Unable to save her, Claire watches her dive to her death, looking, as the street lamps shine on her snow- covered body, like a falling crystal angel. That image leads Claire to flashbacks. Her perfect world begins to crack, and she begins an affair with the suicide's brother, with whom she feels safe enough to conduct the terrifying investigation into her past. In Seattle, Vanessa has struggled through alcoholism and drug abuse to become a doctor and an activist for molested children. She has a devoted lover and finally feels strong enough to face her perpetrators. Chamberlain manages a lot of plot with great skill, strengthening her story by using devices more common to action thrillers and mysteries and by telling about carousels, adolescent medicine, and how to have sex with the disabled. Unfortunately, her denouement, in a Senate hearing room, in front of a TV camera and a congressional pedophile, becomes suddenly very pat, like a successful summer movie. Nevertheless, ripe storytelling that deserves a prominent place in the beach bag. (Literary Guild alternate selection)

Pub Date: Oct. 12, 1994

ISBN: 0-06-017612-1

Page Count: 416

Publisher: HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1994

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE LAST HOUSE ON THE STREET
by Diane Chamberlain

- BOOK REVIEW
BIG LIES IN A SMALL TOWN
by Diane Chamberlain

- BOOK REVIEW
THE DREAM DAUGHTER
by Diane Chamberlain

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THE CATCHER IN THE RYE

by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951

A strict report, worthy of sympathy.

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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

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- SEEN & HEARD
Salinger Focus of NYPL Exhibit

- SEEN & HEARD
NYC Mayoral Candidates Name Favorite Gotham Books

- APPRECIATIONS
Holden Caulfield: Forever Young

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THE SHINING

by Stephen King ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 28, 1976

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A presold prefab blockbuster, what with King's Carrie hitting the moviehouses, Salem's Lot being lensed, The Shining itself sold to Warner Bros. and tapped as a Literary Guild full selection, NAL paperback, etc. (enough activity to demand an afterlife to consummate it all).

The setting is The Overlook, a palatial resort on a Colorado mountain top, snowbound and closed down for the long, long winter. Jack Torrance, a booze-fighting English teacher with a history of violence, is hired as caretaker and, hoping to finish a five-act tragedy he's writing, brings his wife Wendy and small son Danny to the howling loneliness of the half-alive and mad palazzo. The Overlook has a gruesome past, scenes from which start popping into the present in various suites and the ballroom. At first only Danny, gifted with second sight (he's a "shiner"), can see them; then the whole family is being zapped by satanic forces. The reader needs no supersight to glimpse where the story's going as King's formula builds to a hotel reeling with horrors during Poesque New Year's Eve revelry and confetti outta nowhere....

Back-prickling indeed despite the reader's unwillingness at being mercilessly manipulated.