Indie film star Craze debuts with a coming-of-age story set in an English coastal resort. “It can be dangerous to live by the shore.” Especially during the off-season, as 12-year-old narrator May finds out when her mother buys a seaside B&B. For the London-bred May, the danger is mainly a matter of loneliness, learning to adjust to an environment so different from the one she left behind. May’s father Simon has stayed on in the City, and May and her baby brother Eden see very little of him. Her mother Lucy is something of a superannuated child herself, giving to dating rock stars and spending entire days hanging out or talking on the phone with her friends Annabel and Suzy. There’s not much to do at a summer resort in the weeks leading up to Christmas, and May’s early-teenaged ennui has become rather morbidly inflamed by the time an unexpected guest calls from London looking for a room. A middle-aged writer looking for a place quiet and out-of-the-way, Rufus arrives a few days later—and is given May’s room. As if that weren—t bad enough, he begins flirting with her mother almost as soon as he moves in—even though his editor and girlfriend Jessica is a regular visitor. Jessica senses something amiss, and she begins, whenever she drops by, to pump May for information. Later on, May’s father drops in for an extended visit himself. Simon is something of a rogue, a charming, unreliable character in a nice suit and a red Porsche who has great plans for a wine bar he’s trying to open in London. He wants them all to come back and live with him, but May’s mother seems dubious. Is she suspicious of her husband’s big venture? Or is there really something between her and Rufus? Sometimes it takes a child to see what all the grownups are missing. A good-natured, likable story with plenty of flavor but very little substance: not bad, though, for the first time out.
Pub Date: May 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-87113-746-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1999
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
Genetically engineered dinosaurs run amok in Crichton's new, vastly entertaining science thriller. From the introduction alone—a classically Crichton-clear discussion of the implications of biotechnological research—it's evident that the Harvard M.D. has bounced back from the science-fantasy silliness of Sphere (1987) for another taut reworking of the Frankenstein theme, as in The Andromeda Strain and The Terminal Man. Here, Dr. Frankenstein is aging billionaire John Hammond, whose monster is a manmade ecosystem based on a Costa Rican island. Designed as the world's ultimate theme park, the ecosystem boasts climate and flora of the Jurassic Age and—most spectacularly—15 varieties of dinosaurs, created by elaborate genetic engineering that Crichton explains in fascinating detail, rich with dino-lore and complete with graphics. Into the park, for a safety check before its opening, comes the novel's band of characters—who, though well drawn, double as symbolic types in this unsubtle morality play. Among them are hero Alan Grant, noble paleontologist; Hammond, venal and obsessed; amoral dino-designer Henry Wu; Hammond's two innocent grandchildren; and mathematician Ian Malcolm, who in long diatribes serves as Crichton's mouthpiece to lament the folly of science. Upon arrival, the visitors tour the park; meanwhile, an industrial spy steals some dino embryos by shutting down the island's power—and its security grid, allowing the beasts to run loose. The bulk of the remaining narrative consists of dinos—ferocious T. Rex's, voracious velociraptors, venom-spitting dilophosaurs—stalking, ripping, and eating the cast in fast, furious, and suspenseful set-pieces as the ecosystem spins apart. And can Grant prevent the dinos from escaping to the mainland to create unchecked havoc? Though intrusive, the moralizing rarely slows this tornado-paced tale, a slick package of info-thrills that's Crichton's most clever since Congo (1980)—and easily the most exciting dinosaur novel ever written. A sure-fire best-seller.
Pub Date: Nov. 7, 1990
ISBN: 0394588169
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1990
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