by Hendrik E. Sadi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 11, 2008
Subtle, patient and absolutely lovely.
A beautiful, wide-reaching story of the families who live and die in Upland, a bucolic American settlement in decline.
A lasting image from Sadi’s novel is the cloud of dust that remains hanging in the air after a host of characters leave Upland, the small farming community at the center of the author’s moving, meditative piece of fictional family history. The tiny berg comes to represent a lost way of life, a bygone era when people were closer to the land and, in the best of times, closer to one another. Technology and the lure of the city threaten that idyllic lifestyle, and this is the story of the attrition that inevitably wears it away. The novel–which begins shortly after the Civil War and stretches more than a hundred years later–revolves around a number of Upland families, none more important than the eponymous Jenfords, whose patriarch Clayborn clears the first fields for farming. Sadi’s book is a love letter to the Jenfords and to the slower pace at which they steadfastly live their lives. The author is a skilled prose stylist, and his sentences are like the furrows in the fertile earth of Upland–long, straight and hard-won. Sadi labors over his words like a farmer labors over his land, and both are sure that their hard work will yield lush, green life. Readers would be lucky if all writers devoted so much sweat to their craft. Nonetheless, Sadi would benefit at times to let some of the city’s flash into his pastoral tale; the care he devotes to his idyllic saga sometimes becomes overbearing, his narrative occasionally risks falling into tedium. But it never quite does, and this book remains an almost Steinbeck-like tribute to family, community and the land.
Subtle, patient and absolutely lovely.Pub Date: Jan. 11, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-595-48351-8
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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BOOK REVIEW
by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951
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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SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2006
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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