Acting jobs in New York aren't the most reliable source of income, and so Dana Coakley fills the time between TV ads for coffee by doubling as super of her Upper West Side building. As a super she's naturally interested when things go wrong in other buildings, but she finds Travis Williams's story hard to believe. The surly kid from an alternative school tells her that his building, an SRO called the Harrison, was torched (to the tune of ten fatalities) by a friend of a friend of a friend—and this last friend, the only potential witness, can't go to the cops because he's been the victim of a timely drive-by shooting. Putting on her actress hat—despite this debut novel's title, she puts in almost no time as a super—Dana makes a series of increasingly nosey, and dangerous, forays into the rarefied world of Mitchell Brandon, the sharklike developer who'd been interested in the Harrison site. Before you know it, she's getting razzed by her sidekick, socialite book editor Peggy Woodruff; pushed around by the D.A.'s office; and beaten up by thugs who threaten her with worse. Dana's masquerades—she tries to be all things to all men in order to pump at least some of them—are often amusing, as is her banter with Peggy; but they're not enough to compensate for the pokey pace and lack of mystery. A lackadaisical slice of downscale New York chic, whose dependably bright-eyed heroine deserves fewer fits and starts.
Pub Date: June 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-312-15651-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1997
1889
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-689-81669-3
Page Count: 140
Publisher: Atheneum
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1999
A girl’s interest in family history overlaps a coming-of-age story about her vestigial understanding of her mother after death, and her own awareness of self and place in the world. Junior high-school student Carrie Schmidt identifies strongly with the missing girls of 1967’s headlines about runaways. Carrie’s mother is dead and she has just moved in with her grandmother, Mutti, who embarrasses her with her foreign accent and ways. Carrie’s ideal is her friend Mona’s mother, a “professional” who dresses properly, smells good, and knows how to set out a table; readers will grasp the mother’s superficiality, even though Carrie, at first, does not. Mutti has terror in her past, and tells Carrie stories of the Jews in WWII Vienna, and of subsequent events in nine concentration camps; these are mined under the premise that Carrie needs stories for “dream” material and her interest in so-called lucid dreaming, a diverting backdrop that deepens the story without overwhelming it. Mutti’s gripping, terrible tales and the return of an old friend who raised Carrie’s mother when she was sent to Scotland at age nine awaken in Carrie a connection to her current family, to her ancestry, and, ultimately, to a stronger sense of self. This uncommon novel from Metzger (Ellen’s Case, 1995, etc.) steps out of the genre of historical fiction to tell a story as significant to contemporary readers as to the inhabitants of the era it evokes. (Fiction. 10-14)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-670-87777-8
Page Count: 194
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1999
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