Amusing but also smart about people and unexpectedly sweet.
Will someone help this poor young woman with her virginity?
Despite being reasonably attractive and chalking up a few near misses, Julia Greenfield has reached the age of 26 without having sex. Now it’s all she can think about. “Untouched. Like a flower suffocating in its own air. Like something pickling in its own juices. Something that badly needs to be turned inside out, banged right.” Her obsession with this issue is magnified by the fact that she’s lost the focus once provided by her nearly-but-not-quite Olympic swimming career. Since she hates her job, there’s nothing to keep her in the D.C. suburb where she’s moved after college, but she can’t go home because her parents have rented out their house and gone to Costa Rica. So she ends up spending the summer with her dowager Aunt Vivienne in North Carolina. Terrifyingly, Viv turns out to be a virgin, too, and the dull small town she lives in looks like part of the problem. Nonetheless, Julia forges gamely on. A contributor to the New Yorker's “Shouts and Murmurs” humor column, Rathbone (The Patterns of Paper Monsters, 2010) reliably wrings the humor out of this situation, but more impressively, she manages to evoke its poignancy. Julia’s longing is revealed in moments like this, watching a friend with her boyfriend: “he put his hand on her chest, kind of fit his fingers above her collarbone as if it was a ridge on a rock face and he was going to climb her. I’d thought about that for a long time.” Also nuanced is the uncomfortable relationship between aunt and niece, in which both withhold more than they give.
Amusing but also smart about people and unexpectedly sweet.Pub Date: July 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-59463-477-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
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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