Promising idea, but, told through a yawn, without the tension the genre demands.
Bengal tiger goes AWOL from an overturned circus truck and takes up a biped-only protein diet. Strictly from the rope-a-dope school of mystery thriller: the reader sees all the punches coming.
Effectively if not so subtly, first-novelist Warner, retired journalist, invokes Kipling through a reverent hunter vs. man-eater prologue that’s set in India. Then the reader is dumped into modern-day rural Georgia as the devil-in-giant-cat-drag chews its way through mountainous scenery. The prologue may have been replaced abruptly by the red Georgia clay, but the classic types—Great White Hunter, Jungle Boy, and Man-Eating Tiger—are transported from the past virtually intact, two-dimensional and bloodless. Warner hurriedly covers all the events that were foreshadowed in the prologue. The only stranger to those familiar with the genre is a nicely portrayed rural sheriff, Grady Brickhouse, who’s not a cartoonish country galoot but a sensitive modern gentleman doing his best to deal with a dangerous carnivore and a drooling press corps. Sheriff aside, the rest of the cast is drawn in dotted-line primary colors. Beyond vague descriptions of the “man eater’s” gory dining habits and some references to sexual activity by secondary characters, there’s little of violence or prurience here, a curious absence that tends to give the whole a YA atmosphere. The only lust is the insatiable feline’s. And, remarkably soon, even the primal, nightmarish terror of humans being stalked and eaten by a huge, reddish cat with burning yellow eyes becomes routine.
Promising idea, but, told through a yawn, without the tension the genre demands.Pub Date: June 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-765-30343-4
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 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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