The prolific Glancy (Flutie, 1998, etc.) continues her exploration of the sources and nature of religious faith. Hadley Willigie’s family, rooted in a small Missouri town, is loudly dysfunctional: her mother is stringently religious, embracing a harsh version of Christianity; her father is a tough-minded journalist, outdoorsman—and skeptic. Hadley, her brother Gus, and her younger sister Healey react in varied but equally extreme ways to the escalating battles over child-rearing belief between their parents. Healey becomes profoundly devout, Gus retreats into a seductive dreamworld, and Hadley, torn between a desire to believe and admiration for her charming father, frequently draws her mother’s ire. Looming in the background is Aunt Mary, their mother’s astringent sister, a woman absolutely convinced of the rightness of her disturbing, caustic, and intense version of Christianity. Glancy follows Hadley from childhood to middle age. She marries, becomes a journalist and a mother herself, and continues to wobble between despairing doubt and faith. Healey, meanwhile, becomes a missionary in Africa, returning home only infrequently and seeming more serene than her mother or aunt, but just as devout. Glancy seems to suggest that Hadley’s inability to enjoy life or connect fully with her husband or children has something to do with her inability to discover a healing faith. That changes, though, during a revival meeting, when a faith-healer, seemingly by the laying on of hands, is able to arouse in Hadley a restorative sense of belief and self-acceptance. Glancy’s determination to plumb an unfashionable question in fiction—how faith or the lack of it shapes and sustains our lives—is admirable, but it’s undermined here by a fragmented, sometimes cryptic narrative, by language that sometimes labors too hard to catch the tang and pace of real speech, and by Hadley’s wan character. Nonetheless, there are moving passages, and the battles over dogma and doubt are often fascinating. Well-intentioned, but more interesting for its ideas than for its characters.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1999
ISBN: 1-55921-271-3
Page Count: 200
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1999
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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