Call these bedtime firecrackers.
YA novelist Block (I Was a Teenage Fairy, 1998, etc.) moves into the adult market—the very adult market—in a series of tales tied together by lyrical sex that would stir a wooden Indian.
So many of these spirited sketches turn on sexual metamorphosis that readers may wonder whether Block has been boning up on Ted Hughes’s wonderful Tales from Ovid. Tom Mac (‘Mer’) is an aging surfer who has lost the urge to ride the waves until one day in the rain he meets a girl in a wheelchair, her T-shirt plastered to her breasts and her nipples hard. Her legs stay covered while they make all sorts of love short of coitus. The girl is, of course, a goddess of the sea, though we never find out whether she has a mermaid’s tail. Tom takes up surfing again, and their love life only improves. In the title piece, young Sylvie is screwing anything in reach—guys with swastikas, whatever—but is quite unhappy about her nymphomania. Then Sylvie’s best friend, Plum, a fellow poet of the slams, reveals that all the women who go to bed with her find dreamy guys and leave her for them. So shouldn’t Sylvie have shy and tender sex with Plum? Assuredly. In ‘Goddess,’ Elvis Dean’s girlfriend dumps him, then reappears dancing in a strip bar called House of Goddess—only now she has a cat’s face. Mr. Wonder, the magician owner of the House, won’t let any of his surgically altered employees leave unless a man truly loves them. Will Elvis take her back? The final story, ‘Overcoming,’ turns on Carmelita’s fantasies of transformation, which she thinks will keep her lover, Tony, from wandering. But only the fantasies bring her to orgasm, never Tony. Until . . . .
Call these bedtime firecrackers.Pub Date: June 1, 2000
ISBN: 1-885865-30-9
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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