By Frederick Busch ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 8, 1989
From the prolific Busch (Domestic Particulars, Invisible Mending, Too Late American Boyhood Blues, etc.), 14 sometimes touching but as often overreached stories. As if straining for purpose or occasion, Busch takes up situations that frequently have a putatively topical or readied drama about them—a mother has been taken hostage in Lebanon, and her family back home moodily watches her on TV ("Reruns"); a white man is disowned by his emotionally constrained parents after he marries a black woman ("From the New World"); an about-to-be-divorced couple visits one of their parents, a victim of Alzheimer's disease who recognizes neither of them ("Comrades"). A sense of falsely heightened drama pervades the TV-like "Dog Song," with its busily kaleidoscopic overlays of degeneracy, hospitals, and car accidents (a well-off judge, unhappy in marriage, may or may not have attempted suicide by automobile), as it does the time-fractured "Gravity" (in exterior time, a basketball game is being played; in interior time, a woman grieves for the death of her adoptive father). Busch's skill and sensitivity can bring about the simple ring of true gold, as in the best piece here ("Naked"), in which a 13-year-old boy in Brooklyn learns unsettling truths about his parents' past when a close friend (called Uncle Rudy) divorces his wife to marry a younger woman. Almost as true is "To the Hoop" (a teen-aged boy's depression after his mother's suicide), but it and others veer into the robustly mannered, melodramatic, or conscientiously routine—"Greetings from a Farflung Place" (a female singer is a has-been at 41); "In Foreign Tongues" (lonely New Yorkers, long in group therapy, meet for a ritualized dinner and talk); or "Ralph the Duck" (a hard-boiled but all-good man—who works as night watchman at a pretentious college—is haunted, though the reader doesn't know about it until it's sprung at the end, by the memory of a daughter who died young). In all, glimmers of real ore peek out amid the standard in stories that often feel self-consciously willed into being.
Pub Date: April 8, 1989
ISBN: 394-57426-5
Page Count: -
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
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by Frederick Busch ; edited by Elizabeth Strout
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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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