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High Drama

A NOVEL

Lots of fun elements—ghost story, showtime, romantic married love—but the heroine is slow to grow a spine.

In this debut comic novel, a young couple, both high school theater directors, tries to handle drama from parents, students, and others.

Auditions just began for Oliver!, this year’s spring play at Samuel P. Chester Academy, a wealthy private high school. Kelly and Jackson Graham, six months into their jobs as co-directors, are looking forward to doing a musical after previously putting on Arsenic and Old Lace. Kelly will direct and handle the business end, while Jackson serves as musical director and pianist. Their challenges include helicopter parents, overscheduled kids, a daffy choreographer, a rumored weeping ghost, and Tony, the adult tech director who seems determined to take over managing the show. Kelly feels uneasy about Tony and his overly close relationships with students, but the headmaster disagrees, as do parents, who circulate a petition to have Tony replace the Grahams. Can Kelly find her inner director in time for the show—and her job—to go on? Murdock-Prep’s debut novel offers an enjoyably affectionate showcase of high school drama and its familiar elements, such as theater traditions and acting games, like practicing subtext through different ways of saying “Don’t go.” Characters are varied, their conflicts believable if somewhat broad, usually with a good deal of compassion for young actors. Kelly, however, has some annoying tendencies. She’s emotional, high-strung, and thin-skinned—appropriate enough for a (former) actress, but she seems ill-equipped for directing, which requires confident belief in oneself. Her usual reaction to conflict is avoidance. Even late in the novel, she leaves dealing with an “alpha male” student to her husband, because the boy drains her energy. In the narrative, this is all played for rueful laughs, but the helpless-female routine is rather uninspiring. The book’s tone is also somewhat hammy and overdone, as when Kelly’s ex-professor tells her twice, “It’s not you, it’s them,” which somehow rates the exclamatory comment: “The Prof still knows how to drive a point home!”

Lots of fun elements—ghost story, showtime, romantic married love—but the heroine is slow to grow a spine.

Pub Date: Dec. 6, 2014

ISBN: 978-1-5025-3406-4

Page Count: 350

Publisher: CreateSpace

Review Posted Online: April 18, 2016

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MAGIC HOUR

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

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THE CATCHER IN THE RYE

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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