A touching, able, not-too-sentimental look at the ties that bind.
Old friendships and broken dreams in small-town tales of love and betrayal.
Second-novelist Hammond (Going to Bend, 2003) revisits the hardscrabble landscape of coastal Oregon—and ends up in Hubbard, a highway-side township of truckers, used-car salesmen and career waitresses. Her story circles around two long-time residents, high-school friends Anita and Bunny, whose lives have taken somewhat different turns. While Anita, the high-school beauty queen, has married Bob, a lackluster provider who disappears on drinking binges for days on end, Bunny, pregnant in high school, has ended up with Hack, a charming man’s-man who’s supplied her and her daughter with a good home, dental care and a steady income from his job on the used car lot. Yet, as Hammond shows, luck doesn’t always move in one direction. While Anita has always been sure of Bob’s love, Bunny has always had doubts about whether she can keep Hack, a wheeler-dealer who attracts attention wherever he goes, and who now seems to have an eye on the rump of a pretty young thing at work. As the story unfolds, Hammond is deft at balancing the subtle tensions that make for complex characters: It turns out that Bob does love Anita but has also been having an affair with Warren, his childhood friend, on and off for years. And Hack does want to stray but is running from a secret far more serious than any infidelity. Anita and Bunny, whose jealousies run deeply alongside their old friendships, perform a delicate yet careworn dance of balancing their men, each other and the weight of their differently frustrated ambitions. This is, in many ways, a novel about dreams that don’t come true: All of these lives have been dealt raw deals—no one has great expectations, and many have diminished circumstances. Nonetheless, Hammond paints her characters with care, fondness and great dignity.
A touching, able, not-too-sentimental look at the ties that bind.Pub Date: July 5, 2005
ISBN: 0-385-50944-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2005
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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