by Elizabeth Hartley Winthrop ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2008
A surfeit of elitist sensitivity undermines the novel’s genuine intelligence and sensory delights.
At the center of Winthrop’s latest (Fireworks, 2006), which concerns a Manhattan family in crisis, is an abnormally sensitive, artistic and bright 11-year-old girl who has not spoken a word in nine months.
Isabelle’s parents, Wilson and Ruth, are at their wits’ end as the month of December begins. The psychologists to whom they’ve sent their daughter Isabelle have not been able to diagnose the cause of her silence. Wilson and Ruth spend their days, whether in their spacious city apartment or cozy weekend cottage, obsessed with Isabelle’s condition. Ruth, who feels she’s failed as a mother, has closed her law practice to care for Isabelle, while Wilson, an unusually devoted husband and father, displays the kind of patience found only in fiction. Despite small quirks the two are almost too perfect to generate empathy, but they are believably distraught when the principal of Isabelle’s private school, which she has not physically attended since she stopped talking the previous February, decrees that Isabelle must return. Ruth fixates on Isabelle’s art as the key to curing her while Wilson obsesses about a family trip to Africa. Meanwhile, Isabelle draws with precocious talent, secretly learns to play Beethoven on the piano and observes her parents with a mixture of anger and love. Isabelle’s relationship to speech is like an anorexic’s toward food—and actually food looms large in her unspoken yearnings. As Christmas approaches, tensions in the household mount. Isabelle’s beloved dog is diagnosed with cancer. Ruth shows Isabelle’s drawings to her shrink without permission. Ruth’s problematic, possibly schizophrenic brother visits. After the careful, delicately calibrated accretion of detail about Isabelle and her parents, the ending feels disappointingly manufactured and a bit sentimental. Winthrop, who grew up in New York before attending Harvard, where she graduated in 2001, displays an intimate, sometimes excruciatingly obsessive understanding of Isabelle’s privileged Manhattan upbringing.
A surfeit of elitist sensitivity undermines the novel’s genuine intelligence and sensory delights.Pub Date: June 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-307-26830-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2008
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BOOK REVIEW
by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951
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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SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2006
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
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