You can guess how old-fashionedly awful this Denker dunker is going to be from the title and the leading lady's name—Kit Lawrence. (Kit Cornell? Gertrude Lawrence?) Anyway, superbly talented Kit has gone bananas and has been incarcerated in a chic nuthouse called Silvermine, where she's just about through having an affair with Ross, her married psychiatrist. Yes, Ross is unprofessional. Yes, Ross is a bore to listen to ("And there was the special way she brushed back her hair. As she exercised, a wisp of golden hair had come loose from the pinnedup mass. It adhered to her damp cheek, covering her left eye. She brushed it back and at the same moment she saw me and smiled. And it. . . it. . . just. . ."). But Ross gets this neat idea: Kit can only be cured via a reunion with her two great loves, playwright Steve and director Jeff. So, hey, kids, let's put on a play! That's just what they do, this noble, self-sacrificing trio, they put on a Broadway play—a play for Kit to act out her illness in, full of her problematic past: abortions, bad mother, acting nerves, etc. Believe that and you'll believe anything; most folks would have laughed this one off the screen even 40 years ago, even with Bette Davis (who'd have refused to say lines like "You gave me your beautiful shiny play and I broke it"), even when Broadway stars really did have names like Kit Lawrence.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1978
ISBN: 0671819585
Page Count: 356
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 29, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1978
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
A presold prefab blockbuster, what with King's Carrie hitting the moviehouses, Salem's Lot being lensed, The Shining itself sold to Warner Bros. and tapped as a Literary Guild full selection, NAL paperback, etc. (enough activity to demand an afterlife to consummate it all).
The setting is The Overlook, a palatial resort on a Colorado mountain top, snowbound and closed down for the long, long winter. Jack Torrance, a booze-fighting English teacher with a history of violence, is hired as caretaker and, hoping to finish a five-act tragedy he's writing, brings his wife Wendy and small son Danny to the howling loneliness of the half-alive and mad palazzo. The Overlook has a gruesome past, scenes from which start popping into the present in various suites and the ballroom. At first only Danny, gifted with second sight (he's a "shiner"), can see them; then the whole family is being zapped by satanic forces. The reader needs no supersight to glimpse where the story's going as King's formula builds to a hotel reeling with horrors during Poesque New Year's Eve revelry and confetti outta nowhere....
Back-prickling indeed despite the reader's unwillingness at being mercilessly manipulated.
Pub Date: Jan. 28, 1976
ISBN: 0385121679
Page Count: 453
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1976
PERSPECTIVES
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