Recent fiction, enamored with the endless possibilities of second servings, offers another in the genre: a new take on Edith Wharton's classic Ethan Frome. Wharton's original tells the tragic tale of Ethan, trapped in a loveless marriage to the icy, hardened Zeena. A distant cousin, sent to his isolated farmhouse to nurse his dying mother, she married Ethan when his desperation at spending another winter alone overcame him. He falls in love with the carefree Mattie Silver, though as their love can never blossom, they opt for a double suicide, botch the job and spend the next 20 years crippled, nursed by an unforgiving Zeena. In Cooke's (Complicity, 1988) revision, the tale is told from Zeena's perspective, subtly challenging the specter of Wharton's vision of her as a malevolent jailer. The novel takes as its focus the time before Ethan and Zeena were married. Here, Zeena desires to do good, and to escape the provincial trappings of spinsterhood by moving to the big city. She tends to her cousin Beatrice, though Ethan seems to think she's there to cook and clean. After days of constant care and the drudgery of domestic work, described at times in ponderous and repetitive detail, Zeena finds that she's come too late to save the woman. Shortly after his mother's death, Ethan proposes, and Zeena accepts in a haze of sexual longing, emboldened by the notion that she and Ethan may make a fresh start elsewhere by springtime. But that springtime never comes. Zeena's heart turns to ice as she learns only months after her marriage that Ethan boldly loves another woman, foreshadowing and making more poignant the tragic events of the original. A successful and inventive view of Wharton's character, transcending the shrew of the original. But this version gains much of its resonance from a knowledge of that original text, and those unfamiliar with Ethan Frome may find the few months described in the novel to be as long as a New England winter.
Pub Date: Oct. 13, 1996
ISBN: 0-312-14775-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
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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