This cheeky little novel reads like a postcard from Weldon gone on holiday, frolicking with fiction, dashing off diatribes on everything from cosmology to sex. It's a short story plumped up (by the author of The Heart of the Country, 1988, etc.) to mixed effect. In it Weldon studies 42-year-old Sandra Harris Sorensen, known to her TV fans as "Starlady Sandra," a famous astronomer who discovered the planet Athena. As the novel opens, she's run, with nothing but a checkbook and spare pair of jeans, from her boring husband, Matthew (a missionary-position man), to accompany Mad Jack Stubbs, leader of the Citronella Jumpers, a New Orleans Revival band, on a gig in the South of France. "Say I was desperate, if you like, latched on to Mad Jack the trumpeter. . .as if he were a tree trunk and I falling over a cliff," she explains. She's a minx of a gel, who pauses between episodes in the sack with Jack to tell of her insane mother and her father, the mad Nazi geneticist Oscar von Stirpit, to ponder the ways of women, men, and the stars, and to vow that with genes like hers, childbearing is out of the question. But when she becomes pregnant, she decides to leave lusty Jack to his sniveling wife, and to have her child—after all, as she says, "What's the point: the species will never be perfected, were perfection in mind, which of course it isn't, just endless workable forms." A romp that bounces by myriad interesting ideas before ultimately abandoning them. For here, Weldon's far too pleased with her own agile voice to lock herself in battle with anything serious.
Pub Date: June 19, 1989
ISBN: 670-82440-2
Page Count: -
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
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
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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