You shouldn’t like this stuff, but it’s such a rush.
A young life of spectacular crime and drugs nearly leads to a life of writing—but merciful fate and powerful addictions intervene.
Interrupting his hell-bent, breakneck narrative from time to time with threats of literary fiction, Little, who introduced Bad Bobbie Prine in his 1998 Another Day in Paradise, keeps threatening to turn Bobbie from a life of very hard drugs, punk rock, and surprisingly successful felonies to a less fevered existence as a writer, but the reader can only pray along with St. Augustine. Not yet. Please. Because when Bobbie does turn peaceable (as did the formerly criminal author), we will stop seeing with blinding clarity inside the smack-riddled mind of a brilliant kid doing everything wrong, which is a rare sight, and see instead inside the mind of a writer, which you can see anytime. Bobbie’s new adventures start up in 1975 in a hellish Indiana youth facility where it takes total concentration to stay alive and in one piece. The politics is racial, of course, and the resentment and hostilities make Bosnia look like summer camp. All Bobbie wants is to escape, which, after a gruesome battle, he does, fleeing with his mates across the Illinois line to hook up with some old criminal chums who have taken up farming and religion. Sort of. When his wounds have recovered and the rural life palls, Bobbie heads for New York to reunite with Sydney, the con artist whose treachery put him in prison after their last job. Syd’s moved up to white-collar crime, and she’s making bundles of money and living the high life. Bobbie, re-addicted to heroin, gets hooked on big money, big sex, and big music. His career path will give him enough polish to pass for civilized and, after some on-the-job training in basic fraud, eventually take him to Boston, where he will meet hard men and a college girl with a nose for literary talent. His graduation to really big crime leads, of course, to really big trouble.
You shouldn’t like this stuff, but it’s such a rush.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-28291-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2001
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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