When Maylou's mama keels over dead in a retirement trailer park in Florida, Maylou takes her grief—as ``wild as the ache of wishing for a miracle''—round trip from Topeka, Kansas, to bring her mama's ashes home. Along the way, Maylou, 26 and dazed with missing her mama, undergoes a series of zany adventures. Picking up her elderly, eccentric father, John, at the ill-fated trailer camp, she meets nosy neighbors Vern and Doris, their redneck son Bubba, Bubba's disaffected, gum-snapping wife CeCe, and Bubba and CeCe's bizarre little boy, Larry, who has adopted Maylou's childhood pet dog Oscar and keeps him alive on a diet of beetles. When Maylou and John drive off for Kansas, CeCe—unable to put up with life with Bubba and Larry a minute longer—stows away. Stopping for the night in Georgia, Maylou and John witness CeCe falling in love with a psychic named Sherman; CeCe refuses to leave, and soon Vern and Doris show up with Larry and Oscar in tow, announcing that son Bubba has unexpectedly been crushed to death by a vending machine. Maylou, unable to budge her father from his newly adopted project of translating into carvings the secret messages of trees outside Sherman's cabin, takes off by herself, detouring to Graceland before finally arriving home—where she consults a second psychic named Red Dog, buries her beloved mother's ashes in a local graveyard, and falls for Emmanuel, the graveyard flower vendor, eventually leaving her ne'er-do-well husband Zak for a life of love even her devoted mother would have been satisfied with for her. An only mildly amusing, slapdash comedy.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-88910-409-3
Page Count: 218
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1993
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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