A substantive, multilayered story of sexual tension and betrayal.
An eye-opening look at the world of psychology told through a complicated romance.
Eli Fox, a family therapist, is proud of his chosen career path: “an earthy profession [that] traveled less pretentious terrain than either the skybound gods of medicine or the…abstract land of testing and personality schemes.” He follows his internal commander, a definitive internal voice that guides him through the complicated maze of administering therapy. Eli’s days are spent working with his fellow staff and guiding not only his patients, but a married doctor named Meagan Rush, a young woman Eli supervises as she learns the ropes. Eli and Meagan, two committed professionals, are eager to learn from one other and help each other succeed, but soon, their chemistry overtakes them. As Eli and Meagan’s sexual relationship escalates, the two struggle to preserve their working relationship. Determined to keep certain boundaries, the two maintain a painful, teasing dance, until Eli withdraws from the liaison. She decides to take dramatic action within her own marriage and ends up in trouble with the law, eventually dragging Eli down with her. As the drama heightens and a man with ambiguous morals takes over the institute, the corruption lurking behind the idealistic therapists begins to surface. Hidden resentments and unseemly intentions threaten to derail the therapy industry. Fraught with tension, this psychological novel delves into the study of human behavior while emphasizing its intricacies through a broken romance. Anderson highlights weaknesses and buried sensitivities as he uncovers the darkness within the patients as well as their therapists. While the story’s pace quickens toward its conclusion, psychology, ethics and the law get tangled up in a gripping tale of self-destructive behavior.
A substantive, multilayered story of sexual tension and betrayal.Pub Date: May 10, 2012
ISBN: 978-1475906233
Page Count: 384
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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