Sabatini is an effective miniaturist but fumbles the big picture.
An interracial relationship plays out against Zimbabwe’s slow disintegration in this elliptical first novel.
Lindiwe Bishop is a colored (mixed race) girl in a country where race and tribe matter enormously. It’s 1982, two years since blacks achieved majority rule after a brutal war, but suspicions and resentments simmer. Fourteen-year-old Lindiwe has three stories to tell: her own, her neighbor’s and her country’s. The McKenzies next door are the last whites in a previously all-white suburb of Bulawayo. Ian, 17, has just been accused of killing his stepmother by setting her on fire. After he’s released on appeal (his confession was coerced), he and Lindiwe become friends. Quiet, bookish Lindiwe has complete faith in Ian’s innocence. He may talk like a Rhodie (redneck), but she senses his underlying gentleness and is grateful for his attention, something her withdrawn parents don’t provide. Lindiwe describes her feelings with such restraint that though she and Ian have a night of love before he leaves for South Africa, we don’t know this at the time, nor that it will produce a baby. There are other disconcerting lacunae. Ian’s mentally ill mother hovers on the margins, and we don’t learn the truth about his stepmother’s fiery death; Ian’s different versions are not definitive. After a seven-year hiatus, Ian returns. He’s a photojournalist; Lindiwe is a university student. She dumps the middle-aged French doctor she’s been seeing (another gap), then, on Ian’s insistence, pries their son David away from her mother so they can raise him together. Sabatini crams the story with incidents and paints a grim picture of the Mugabe regime, but she never manages to convince us of the durability of the lovers’ relationship, which is key. Ian never quite gets the race thing—he’s astonished when David is the target of schoolyard taunts—but Lindiwe accepts his obtuseness because, well, he’s her man.
Sabatini is an effective miniaturist but fumbles the big picture.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-316-04993-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2009
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
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