A sweet, albeit rambling, family story.
A debut novel offers a coming-of-age tale about surviving motherhood, finding independence, and living life on one’s own terms.
Life isn’t working out quite the way that Mia Love planned: “Here I was twenty-six years old with no husband, no money, no plan, a dead-end job, no degree, and a newborn baby.” After falling head over heels with Spence "Spider" Snyder in high school, Mia spent the next 10 years devoted to him, dropping out of college and working as a debt collector to support his budding music career. Now they’re living in a roach-infested tenement with their baby, Tee-Bo, and Mia’s crushed dreams of marriage dangling over their heads. In a fairly believable turn of events, Mia finds a letter from a life insurance company while housesitting for Spider’s mother, Dr. Snyder. It turns out that his mother has been withholding information about the insurance bonanza ($50,000) she collected after the death of Spider’s father. Mia’s discovery throws all their relationships into chaos. Snyder is furious over Mia’s breach of trust, and Mia copes with pressure from a critical mother and loudmouthed sister who both think she should dump Spider if he doesn’t wed her on the spot. Mia grows weary of supporting Spider despite his windfall and suspects that he has been unfaithful, while he is threatened by Mia’s longtime best friend, Romell. That relationship has always been platonic, but Romell’s financial success and Mia’s frustration with Spider threaten to complicate the situation. Meanwhile, Tee-Bo has an inexplicable skin condition that has everyone questioning Mia’s ability to take care of her son. Though it’s set in 1995 New York City—a world of pagers, Walkmans, and computers that require disks—Mia’s story is eminently relatable. She valiantly tries to please everyone around her (at times, her insistence on doing everything herself becomes ridiculous, as when she sets out to spend the dregs of her savings to buy Tee-Bo a crib instead of accepting offers from Romell or her mother to buy it for her). But she ends up realizing that sometimes she does have to put herself first. Though the charming novel is longer than it needs to be and meanders, Watts-Hicks’ prose is highly readable and Mia’s evolution is rewarding.
A sweet, albeit rambling, family story.Pub Date: May 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-578-03024-1
Page Count: 380
Publisher: Earthatone Enterprises
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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