Often inconsequential taken alone, the stories build incrementally to create a moving whole.
Ten interconnected tales about a tightknit Ukrainian neighborhood in 1960s Chicago: a first collection from the author of the novel The Sky Unwatched (2000).
Narrator Luba lives with her émigré parents and attends a local college where, eager to assimilate, she uses the name Linda. The first story she tells, “Steve’s Bar,” sets up the community’s generational divisions. Steve’s original patrons, mostly immigrants from DP camps after WWII, look up to officer Kharkevych, the cop they call on to avert neighborhood crises. But their college-age children watching the TV above the bar are nonplussed to see him among the other cops roughing up antiwar protesters from their campus. In “My Black Valiant,” the secondhand car Luba’s purchased, loses its potency as a symbol of rebellion after she catches her parents giggling in it one Sunday morning. “The Celebrity” is a famous Ukrainian poet’s widow whom Luba chauffeurs around in the Valiant. The woman is a money-grubbing phony, but her charisma works genuine magic on Luba and everyone else. A different kind of charisma is at work in “Saint Sonya.” Sonya became briefly famous for bleeding with stigmata during middle school, until Luba told on her for hanging out with boys. Now Sonya works in a bakery and is perfectly content. In “Obligation,” a young woman becomes unraveled when she recognizes a bag lady as the person who saved her life as a child in the camps. “Pani Ryhotska in Love” makes Luba jealous that the old woman can find romance with her aging boarder, especially since Luba’s crush on Pani Ryhotska’s artist son is a theme throughout the stories—finding a disillusioning climax in “The Prodigal Son Enters Heaven.” In the final piece, “John Mars, All American,” Luba faces her own ambivalence when she brings a potential suitor to Steve’s Bar, sees her world through his critical non-Ukrainian eyes, and loses interest in him.
Often inconsequential taken alone, the stories build incrementally to create a moving whole.Pub Date: April 11, 2003
ISBN: 1-56512-332-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
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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