Shocks but utterly fails to linger.
Bleary first novel about a perpetually drugged teenager floating downward through the seedier side of Nashville.
Although you spend this entire book with Christy—she’s the narrator, after all—by the end you have next to no idea who this person this. With post-post–Bret Easton Ellis brio, Hampton-Jones propels the heroine right out of her last year of high school and into an acid-fogged haze from which she displays no interest in a life and little ability to get one. Seemingly without friends in school, she drifts into a job at the mall and sleeps haphazardly with a couple of older guys. The more serious “boyfriend” is Del, a strip-club bouncer in his 30s who has the best pot among Christy’s tiny circle of acquaintances. The only thing approaching reality in her life is younger sister Lizzy, a punked-out shriek of a girl as opinionated and individualistic as Christy is sour and invisible. When Lizzy dies in a car accident, Christy can’t bear to stay in the house with her Jesus-freak mother and leering pothead father. She moves in with Del, and it isn’t long before she’s reincarnated as Sugar, a stripper with a nasty coke habit. Hampton-Jones understands that the blankness of the narration in this sort of doomed-youth story shocks and horrifies more than graphic description, and she also resists the urge to make her tale an appeal for a new lost generation. But for all the deftly observed moments, there are too many easy targets: the freakish parents, the ready availability of strip clubs, the synthetic suburban backdrop. Christy’s tale feels like nothing more than an exercise in style.
Shocks but utterly fails to linger.Pub Date: April 1, 2003
ISBN: 1-57322-243-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2003
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
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