Instrument meets musician, the way boy often meets girl, in this debut novel of passion, jealousy, integrity, and fate. In 1951, Sgt. Martin Luther Cole finds a Stradivarius violin hidden in a Korean farmhouse. Despite his wounds, Luther forces himself to survive in order to safekeep the precious instrument. Italicized interludes trace the history of the violin from its creation in Cremona, Italy, in 1685 to its arrival in Korea (through Paris, Brussels, St. Petersburg, Irkutsk). Luther returns with the violin to a cabin in rural West Virginia. Many years later, in 1980, Luther meets his six-year-old nephew, Ailey Barkwood. Ailey has been living with his schoolteacher, Iris Bentley, since his grandfather died several months earlier. The boy is smart, principled, and a budding, completely self-taught virtuoso violinist. When Ailey is 11, Iris and Luther, realizing that he needs a music teacher, arrange to have him audition for Maestro Joachim Everade, a master teacher in Bronxville, N.Y. Ailey is accepted to Everade's select school, where he meets Lucienne Ysayâ, a violinist his age with whom he immediately falls in love. Ailey passes six happy years in Bronxville. Then Luther finally feels the time is right for him to pass the Stradivarius on to Ailey- -which is when they discover that the violin had once belonged to Lucienne's great-grandfather and that Lucienne's father wants it returned to him. They finally agree to let a sagacious rabbi—who has befriended the two young musicians and has everybody's trust—mediate: Ailey will use the violin in his lifetime, after which it will be returned to the Ysayâ family heirs. Of course, since Ailey and Lucienne plan to marry, the conclusion could not be more satisfying. Ladew manages to convey the sense of destiny so well that the story's contrivances seem natural and necessary. The characters, however, are all too achingly good to be believed. Only the maestro, who in fits of anger hurls insults like ``jazz musician'' at Ailey, has any spark. Hokey, but touching.
Pub Date: Jan. 15, 1995
ISBN: 0-7867-0136-6
Page Count: 291
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1994
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
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