An engaging piece of English upstairs-downstairs business as a young woman weaves a tangled web of deception to help her unemployed husband and ailing baby. British writer White (Dogboy, 1996, etc.) likes a bit of satire in her novels, and here she adroitly skewers tycoons, under- class layabouts, and lineage-obsessed gentry as she tells the story of Ange Harper, the orphan who dreamed big. Ange has been brought up in foster homes, but somehow none ever kept her long; she learned about the finer things of life from one of them, but at 16 she was on her own. In love with weak but handsome Billy Harper, who's run away from home and can't seem to hold a job, Ange marries him when she finds she's pregnant. On welfare, the two are placed in a squalid residential hotel, and Ange is determined to find something better for Billy and son Jacob. Soon, the beautiful and intelligent young mother comes up with the perfect scheme: She'll hide her marriage to Billy, will marry and then—at an appropriate time—divorce a wealthy businessman. She settles on the twice- married and currently single Sir Fabian Ormerod. Using her wits and imagination, she fakes her history, steals fashionable clothes, and passes herself off as an upper-class career woman, eventually becoming the new Lady Ormerod. But the best-laid plans inevitably go wrong. Fabian's daughter by his first marriage, fearing the loss of her inheritance when Ange bears a son, plots with a charismatic satanist to get rid of her; Ange is sent disturbing, anonymous letters that vividly detail her childhood and current life; and Jacob is kidnapped. All manner of truths are eventually revealed, but Sir Fabian, it turns out, can't afford scandal, and asks Ange to continue to appear in public as his wife and the mother of his heir. A contemporary cautionary tale with bite and flair.
Pub Date: April 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-75280-045-0
Page Count: 295
Publisher: Orion/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1997
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
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