Strong story, immense fun, but shortchanged on passion.
Driscoll’s second novel strives for a more sustained focus and an even gutsier grip on the reader than Lucky Man, Lucky Woman (1998). His writing remains fresh as ever.
Stardog hurtles along like a terrific movie, with the author creating wonderful visual images while padding the plot with the usual novelistic background stuff that will get cut from the screenplay. This approach is entertaining, but readers are unlikely to be moved by any of it; Driscoll tries for emotion at the end, but a dose of climactic melodrama befogs his hopes and the story’s deepest possibilities. Earl Patrick Godfrey, a schoolbus driver and recovering alcoholic, reads that ex-wife Diane has put his glorious customized 1977 candy-apple red Ranchero 500 up for sale. Earl happens to be driving by his old house, where the Ranchero sits. Suddenly he stops the bus, leaves the kids, plows through snow to the garage and steals his former but still blazingly beautiful pickup. Using Diane’s Mastercard, he steals $200 from her account and takes his old beauty for a last ride, an illegal but glorious outing. At a Chippewa casino on the Upper Michigan Peninsula, he’s fed a straight flush worth $12,870 by casino dealer Miranda Mtn., who tells him to meet her later at a hotel. They join forces, and Miranda makes it clear that their stolen pot is a stake in doubling their take by betting everything on the red or black at a Canadian casino and then again at Atlantic City. Thus the story becomes a road movie as Earl and Miranda get to know each other—and Miranda’s quite an eccentric. What’s more, since abandoning her casino job overnight, she’s being chased by casino bounty hunters who know she cheated them. Unfortunately, Miranda’s character is never fully exploited, and her tie to Earl seems less than heartfelt.
Strong story, immense fun, but shortchanged on passion.Pub Date: May 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-7894-2626-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: DK Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2000
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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