A dark novel pulled under by communist machinations and human mortality.
In a strenuous, sad debut, a buff Southern California rock-climbing couple comes face to face with cancer.
Married ten years, journalist Molly and philosophy professor Tom Valen are world-class mountaineers, frequently scrambling over boulders in the Tahquitz Mountains east of Los Angeles, near their home. In November 1988, Molly, age 33, is hit by a falling rock, and the MRI reveals a cancerous tumor in her brain. She is given a year to life, and the devoted couple decide that Tom will take a leave from his school so they can take off on a last climbing spree to France, then to the Tatra Mountains—in what is then still Czechoslovakia—where they climbed years before and made good friends with noted Slovakian climber and national hero Stefan Borak. Though she insists on climbing, Molly grows increasingly debilitated, lapsing into the gibberish of the diary she titles “Possessed by Shadows,” while Tom feels a creeping sense of despair and helplessness. Meeting the cheerful, determined Stefan in Bratislava bolsters them, yet the country has been in the throes of intense communist oppression since the uprising of 1968, and many of Stefan’s family and friends have been arrested. Besides, the friends’ greatest accomplishments are behind them—like the climb of the Himalayan Nangat Parbat 15 years earlier, when Stefan saved Tom’s life. As a result, the story has an elegiac feel, unraveling to its doomed and inevitable ending. Molly and Tom, in alternate points of view, reveal glimpses of their triumphant past together as well as Molly’s early love for a master female climber she met as a teenager, a Czech named Sasa, and for Stefan. Ingenuously, Merritt weaves in a goodly lot about climbing, ranges and paraphernalia (it can all be jargon-heavy: glossary in the back), while fashioning a poignant portrait of a loving marriage nipped too soon.
A dark novel pulled under by communist machinations and human mortality.Pub Date: June 21, 2005
ISBN: 1-59051-158-1
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2005
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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