A comically inventive but tenderly poignant family tale, both funny and moving.
A young boy becomes caught between two parental prophecies involving the priesthood and major league baseball in this novel.
After the Brooklyn Dodgers defect to Los Angeles, Harry Sisler, an obsessive fan, feels compelled to vacate New York City as well, and he moves his family to Ronkonkoma, a sleepy hamlet in the “hinterlands” of Long Island. Harry seems lost more than ever and becomes convinced, based on his bizarrely creative and aggressively heretical readings of the Bible, that he will die by the age of 50. At the time of this morbid prophecy, he’s 37, leaving him 13 years to accomplish something worthwhile, relieving him from a life of quiet disappointment. But Harry doesn’t plan on dying without purpose—when his second son, Tristram, is born, he announces another prophecy: It is his boy’s destiny to become a professional baseball player, one who is twice as good as Joe DiMaggio. With maniacal and relentless intent—and often against both Tristram’s wishes and any sign of precocious athletic talent—Harry attempts to rob the boy’s life of any distraction that could compete with his focus on the sport. Meanwhile, Harry’s wife, Agatha, has her own grand designs for Tristram—she decides, shortly after he is born, that his purpose in life is to become a Roman Catholic priest based on a hilariously self-assured interpretation of an ambiguous “mark” on the boy. Schneider (Pig in Flight, 2019), in this endearingly humorous tale of frustrated aspirations, chronicles Tristram’s unenviable role as a kind of filial wishbone, caught between the competing but equally intractable futures assigned to him by his parents. The author’s prose is crisply game, and he manages to combine a farcically fantastical tale with a sober portrayal of an authentic emotional drama. Harry is not merely a psychotically clownish alcoholic, but also a common man who struggles profoundly with his ordinariness and his failure to capitalize on talent and opportunity when they present themselves. And Tristram’s heartbreaking plight—wanting to be free of his father’s despotic control while yearning to become closer to him—is effectively depicted.
A comically inventive but tenderly poignant family tale, both funny and moving.Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-73295-185-3
Page Count: 302
Publisher: Glimmerglass Publishing Co.
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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