The relentlessly uplifting Denker (A Gift of Life, The Retreat, The Choice, et multissima alia) pleads for racial understanding in a rather long (454-page) heartwarmer about a couple of Jewish immigrants who raise a black orphan girl. David and Rebecca Rosen, who were born in the same Polish town but didn't meet each other until they came to New York, are near despair after four miscarriages that have left Rebecca sterile. The hatter and housewife have no hope for the future. But the Rosens' kindly, housecalling physician, Dr. Pomerantz, sends dangerously depressed Rebecca to do volunteer work at a neighborhood orphanage—where she takes under her wing the only black child, eight-year-old Elvira Hitchins, whose widowed mother has been shipped off to the TB sanatorium. But, alas, Elvira's mother is too far gone to save, and the Rosens become Aunt Rebecca and Uncle David to the bright little orphan and see her through the unenlightened and racist 1930's, sending her to the best public schools, steeping her in the most heartwarming aspects of Judaic and African-American cultures. Little Elvira learns Hebrew and goes to a Baptist church; Aunt Rebecca learns to cook soul food; Uncle David learns to eat cornbread; everybody eats lots of chicken. Uncle David makes lots of money from lots of hats; Aunt Rebecca does lots of volunteer work; and Elvira does all of her homework and goes to Hunter with a Regents' scholarship. There is romance, tragedy, and the Second World War. No sex. No violence. Plenty hankies.
Pub Date: March 1, 1991
ISBN: 0688104509
Page Count: 468
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 29, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1991
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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