Winner of Britain's 1991 Whitbread Award for a first novel: a fact/fiction pastiche, using the life of 1950's pop-singer Alma Cogan (1932-1966) as the springboard for an intriguing but less- than-satisfying meditation on celebrity. Most Americans have never heard of Cogan. But she was a super- celeb in pre-Beatles, glitzy-showbiz England, with hit versions of songs previously recorded by Teresa Brewer, Patti Page, and others. Here, UK journalist Burn imagines that Alma didn't die in 1966, that instead she's alive in 1986, delivering a rambling monologue about her past and present. Alma recalls her beginnings as the child of stage-struck immigrant-Jewish parents, her first successes in seedy British music-halls, her introduction to assorted backstage sordidness. She remembers her heyday as a beehived ``work of capacious and total artifice'': the smelly crowds of fame, the parties where her mother charmed Noel Coward, her palship with Sammy Davis (who looked ``imagineered, cuboid, like a Picasso painting or an Easter Island sculpture''), her brief encounters with Doris Day and the Queen. But she also recalls her rapid decline in the 1960's, and her 1969 decision—while playing ``an armpit of a club''—to retire to a quiet, boozy, non-celebrity existence. And now, in the present, Alma conducts a grim tour of her bygone fame. In a storage room at the Tate museum, there's a painting of her; at a theater museum, there are the garish gowns worn by a female-impersonator version of Alma; and, most creepily, there's a visit to her #1 fan—whose vast collection even includes obscene messages to Alma from various sickies. Burn brings energy, vivid detail, and sardonic wit to this odd fabrication. But Alma's voice—literary, arch—never rings true; no real person emerges. The insights about the dark side of celebrity are predictable. And Burn's attempt to link the murder of Alma's soul to actual murders (the Manson case, etc.) is terribly strained. In sum: sporadically arresting or amusing, ultimately thin and gimmicky.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-395-63414-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1992
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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