An intelligent, if uneven, blend of romance and family conflict.
A debut novel about four sisters united by crisis.
Sixty-two-year-old Vivian “Vivvie” James teaches English in Madagascar. She’s suffered significant losses in her life, including the deaths of her husband and child, but she’s also a diligent optimist; despite her life in a hardship post, she holds “the charmed secret to life’s riddle: today is exquisitely new.” But when one of Vivvie’s three sisters, Laurel, is diagnosed with cancer, the family calls her home to Massachusetts’ North Shore, and Conover “Con” Bennett, Vivvie’s 49-year-old lover in Madagascar, inexplicably insists on joining her. Brooks’ prose is lush and delectable; in one scene, for example, the sun sinks “into the Indian Ocean like a temptress sliding into bed, kicking off her covers in brilliant streaks of tangerine, vermillion, and violet.” On the North Shore, seaweed is strewn about “as if many Spanish dancers…had fled, dropping their black shawls here and there in the sand in their haste to be home before dawn.” There are many such moments of stunning imagery, but the character development isn’t quite as strong. For example, Crystal Posey, mother of the four “Posey girls,” is a formidable presence in her daughters’ lives, but readers may find her an unimaginative portrait of decay: Vain and nearly deaf, she criticizes her children and resists technological change, and the story wastes much time showing readers how she mistreats her housekeeper, Inez. Laurel, the eldest sister, is essentially a copy of their mother, while Vivvie, Audrey and Jane all have artistic ambitions: Vivvie writes poetry but shares it only with Con; Audrey is a successful poet; and Jane, a former drama teacher, is writing a play. Occasionally, this common ground leads to rather dull exposition about education and art. Of the four sisters, Vivvie is the most sharply drawn, but her romance with Con seems a bit too good to be true; their only real conflict is that she desires to keep the independence she already has. When they finally have a confrontation, it lacks force: “ ‘I want you to forgive me for growing old…and I want you to say you’ll never leave me,’ Vivvie says. ‘All right, then, I won’t,’ Con says. ‘Was that so hard?’ ”
An intelligent, if uneven, blend of romance and family conflict.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2013
ISBN: 978-1935925200
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Peace Corps Writers
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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