Routine fare, from the author of When I Fall In Love (1999) and similar showbiz tear-jerkers.
Songwriter seeks schizophrenic cousin. Object: fame and fortune.
Just because Dahlia Green makes a living (sort of) as a masseuse doesn’t mean she’s a failure in status-obsessed Los Angeles. Not yet. Hey, didn’t her least favorite client, obnoxious but rich slob and film producer Marty Melman, say he was making a movie with the same title as a song she wrote decades ago with her crazy cousin Sunny? Stay By My Side, it was called. And since Marty needs a song for the movie and can spare five minutes of his valuable time to listen to it, Dahlia is off to find that old tape, if the mice haven’t eaten it. And if she can locate an old reel-to-reel to play it on. And come to think of it, she’d better track down Sunny. Joy of joys, Marty likes the song, but Sunny will have to sign the contract if he’s going to use it. Can’t have her showing up and suing for damages, get the picture? Dahlia gets it . . . and she’s off to a group home for the mentally ill in northern California. Horror of horrors, is that sad-looking woman with the bizarre hairdo really Sunny? Yes . . . and she’s none too pleased about being found. What about fame and fortune? Dahlia asks. What about the voices in my head? Sunny responds. Nonetheless, Dahlia decides to gain her cousin’s trust and encourage her to write and sing once more, though Sunny is given to decidedly uninspired philosophizing on the subject: “Great songs come from you really, truly telling your story, and if you tell your story, you tell everyone else’s story, too. Because in the end people are all the same.” And in the end, Tin Pan Alley turns into Memory Lane as the reunited pair come to terms with their past (and their present and their future).
Routine fare, from the author of When I Fall In Love (1999) and similar showbiz tear-jerkers.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2003
ISBN: 0-06-620953-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 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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