by Eugene Mirabelli ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 3, 2012
It’s possible to emerge from this fictional memoir of a colorful, irascible but likable painter with almost no idea of what...
A 70-year-old painter looks back on a life of women and art and ponders the present-day challenges of aging in this loose-limbed narrative.
This is the third Mirabelli (The Goddess in Love with a Horse, 2008, etc.) novel involving members of the Italian-American Cavallù-Stillamare clan, which Renato joined as a foundling in 1930. Family features prominently in the painter’s memories, as do friends, food, and lovers, for all of which he has a hearty appetite into his seventh decade and speaks of warmly. On the sex side, he has: teacher-related fantasies in the fifth grade; a rich marriage that is a fine little love story in itself; a threesome that produces a child he and his wife semi-adopt; and various flings. Yet when the book focuses on his present life at 70, he’s living in relative isolation in his Boston studio while his wife, Alba, lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. This is ostensibly so Renato can focus on painting, but there are suggestions of connubial friction. The marital tensions aren’t improved when a former student’s daughter and her child move into the studio, though the book benefits from a bit of suspense: will he kick her out before or after he sleeps with her? The other thread tugging a reader through is Renato’s halting efforts to get a gallery show, something he hasn’t had in some 30 years, though he and others reckon he’s one of the best painters around. Things look good when a hot dealer shows interest, but she proves hard to nail down. There’s also some suspense concerning Renato’s prostate, among the many pains of aging. What there’s strangely little of from this voluble, engaging, intelligent character is specific talk about art and painting as craft, about color, space, technique, brush stroke, history, influences.
It’s possible to emerge from this fictional memoir of a colorful, irascible but likable painter with almost no idea of what he paints, and that’s frustrating.Pub Date: May 3, 2012
ISBN: 9780929701967
Page Count: 308
Publisher: McPherson & Company
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2016
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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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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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