The antic Viva is fine in small doses, but the worldly-wise Viva who struggles to the kinds of realizations actual kids have...
A punk London schoolgirl discovers some of the many things she doesn’t know about life and love in a snappy first novel that’s meant to tug at your heartstrings too.
If Viva Cohen had a résumé, it would say that she’s in her final year at Griffins School for Girls. The life she’s cast herself in, though, is a lot more glamorous, even when it’s retro-glam and tawdry-glam. Her role models are Liz Taylor, Marilyn Monroe, and her gay Uncle Manny, the only important authority figure in her life who isn’t dead and thumbtacked to her wall. Viva is so cool that her best friend, the impossibly beautiful Treena, couldn’t pick a single one of her Hollywood heroes out of a Photoplay pictorial, and her other best friend, mid-range pop star Ray Devlin, hasn’t even slept with her. She sees 17 as an awkward age, too young for adult relationships, too old to play Lolita to men even older than Ray. Hundreds of waiflike insights like these, delivered from different locations and postures, drive the story, through which other figures drift mainly to provide setup lines or dispense wisdom of their own. (It figures that a depressive singer with the group Kindness of Strangers, the one character who seems to draw Viva into a connection with something outside herself, disappears early on.) Viva floridly fails her exams, joins Ray on a Hollywood junket, compares the real movie stars at the Château Marmont to the ones on the wall back home, runs the cultural gamut from Sartre to Smarties, and eventually realizes that “just because someone likes some of the same films as you, it doesn’t mean you’re going to live happily ever after.”
The antic Viva is fine in small doses, but the worldly-wise Viva who struggles to the kinds of realizations actual kids have before they’re well into their teens, is a little hard to take.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-684-86538-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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