Ten years after his last novel (Family Honor, 1983), Cuomo makes a welcome return with this meaty small-town suspense story that adroitly encompasses family solidarity, class tensions, and teenage culture. Florian Rubio is a success story. The poor kid from the Bronx has become the real-estate whiz with a beautiful home in the showplace town of Trent, Massachusetts (which sounds a lot like Lenox); the middle-aged businessman has moved his parents up from the city, and now that divorced wife Elly has sent their son Brian east for his senior year, there are three generations under one roof. Then disaster strikes. Rivalry between the affluent kids of Trent and their counterparts in working-class Medway climaxes on ``Morp night'' (Trent's humorous inversion of a ``Prom''), when two Medway students drown, trapped in their car. Is it possible that the good-natured, likable Brian, using his father's Corvette, could have forced the other car down the ramp and into the lake? There are enough suspicions for Brian to be indicted (assault and battery, plus manslaughter). Cuomo keeps the suspense building as he alternates viewpoint between Florian and Joyce Johnway, the married woman with whom he's involved. Joyce is a Medway high- school teacher who cherishes her disadvantaged students, even a troublemaker like Jamie Pitt, the prosecution's chief witness and ex-boyfriend of Brian's Morp date, the super-rich Nique. The confidential revelations of this trio, a can of worms, differ markedly from the courtroom testimony; but Cuomo is not knocking the law, simply showing its limitations as well as its strengths. That exquisite evenhandedness is icing on the cake. Readers hungry for a strong plot with credible characters and settings should fall upon Cuomo's novel and devour it.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-679-41230-1
Page Count: 356
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1992
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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