Despite some original touches, mostly in the earlier stories, the collection overall relies on familiar, effortless images...
From rock music legend Parker comes a debut collection of ten stories, only intermittently engaging, that chronicle the life of a young bird-egg enthusiast who grows up to be a jaded but respected figure in the rock ’n’ roll scene.
Young Brian Porker’s fascination for birds’ eggs in all their speckled glory, which is the subject of the first story, “The Sheld-Duck of the Basingstroke Canal,” turns him into an increasingly rapacious collector, until he accidentally drops one of the eggs, cracking it to reveal the fragile, still living form inside. This theme of real life overtaking fantasy is repeated later in Brian’s life, most notably in “Me and the Stones,” when the now-respected rocker Porker is invited by Keith Richards to audition to replace the newly dead Mick Jagger (run over by a bus after stumbling off a curb stoned), only to be rejected—not for his lack of musical ability but for the way he fills out his leather pants (or doesn’t). While several tales deal with the crassness of the music life, others leave it behind to examine decidedly underclass themes, including encounters with thugs and punks, such as the one in the title story, about two skinheads who threaten Brian and a buddy as they drink and dope their way through a midlife fishing trip, until the buddy drops a name that sends the bully boys slinking away. “Chloroform,” one of the rawest and best pieces here, pits the pre-rock Brian against dead-end working conditions in an animal testing facility with a slow-witted co-worker, to whom Brian sells a motorbike on the installment plan, only to realize that the buyer hasn’t understood the agreement.
Despite some original touches, mostly in the earlier stories, the collection overall relies on familiar, effortless images of disillusionment and sordidness.Pub Date: June 21, 2000
ISBN: 0-312-26485-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2000
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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