Yglesias’s first novel in 12 years (The Saviors, 1987, etc.) is an intense portrayal of four elderly sisters variously raging against the dying of the light in contemporary Miami Beach. The focal character is 80-year-old Jenny, who travels from her New England home to help settle the affairs of older sisters Eva and Naomi (beginning with 95-year-old Eva, each is five years older than her younger sibling), because 85-year-old Flora, an annoyingly vigorous extrovert, is too busy with her own unlikely affairs (she’s actually a standup comic working the nursing-home circuit). None of this is entirely believable, and the story’s erratic content and pacing are magnified by inordinately detailed descriptions of Miami landscapes and interiors, often presented as simple itineraries. Despite the threat of an approaching hurricane, very little happens. Jenny, always the dutiful youngest, ever the care-giver, arranges for Eva and Naomi to leave their condominiums and enter full-care facilities. Still, the novel has many impressive strengths. Jenny is an apt commentator on the trashing of contemporary culture (and Miami Beach is a wonderful target); a keen-eyed observer of such condescending horrors as “Miss Molly and Her Songs of Yesteryear . . . a very large, violently redheaded woman in an elaborately beribboned dress.” Yglesias pointedly, poignantly dramatizes the continuing imperiousness of the sex drive, even among the very elderly (Flora crows about virtually all her many boyfriends: “He’s desperately in love with me. I only hope he can get it up”); and she effectively distinguishes the personalities of the four sisters: frightened, cancer-ridden Naomi and frail, querulous, yet tenderhearted Eva are the most vividly done (Flora’s Auntie Mame—like brio is rather more of an acquired taste). Not one of Yglesias’s best, but nevertheless a thoughtful, grimly convincing portrait of old age: something of a rarity in our fiction, and a story well worth attending to.
Pub Date: Oct. 5, 1999
ISBN: 1-883285-16-X
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Delphinium
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1999
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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