Fifteen stories from Hall (Music from a Broken Piano, 1983, etc.)—gritty, hard-luck pieces about disappointment told in a variety of voices. The title story is told by a woman who left her low-rent husband and Oregon to settle in L.A., where she works at an auto- parts store (``I usually worked anything that was white and tattooed'') with black co-worker Asa. The story manages to include biographical sketches with a plot concerning the disappearance of parts from the store and, eventually, the destruction of the place in a suspicious fire. The narrator not only survives, however, but finds a better job and moves up in the world. ``But Who Gets the Children?'' has an ending that is less upbeat. Here, an alcoholic salesman with a wife who is obsessed with remodeling their split- level erupts one evening, in his wife's absence, and trashes the carefully remodeled house. Likewise—in another look at the dark side of the American dream—``The Rock Pool'' is about a reckless girl who steals her brother's car, rents a cottage at a rural motel, and proceeds to shack up with a backpacker before disappearing and just as suddenly showing up dead, floating in the motel's rock pool. The story's vitality emerges as the motel's proprietor and his wife try to reconstruct the girl's history from what little they know and from what the proprietor imagines. ``The Lettuce Wars,'' told by an illegal alien, is about a pilot who crashes while flying too low over the wrong field—it's a quirky vision, unlike ``Beirut,'' which is merely dramatized TV news, and ``A Rumor of Metal,'' which uses sf elements to obfuscate rather than clarify. Despite some implausibilities and flat spots: a jazzy aria redolent of life in contemporary America.
Pub Date: April 1, 1992
ISBN: 1-55728-233-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1992
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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