An intelligent but fictionally unspectacular drama.
A female Christian-theology student struggles in a male-dominated religious landscape in McCullagh’s (USS Bunker Kills, 2014, etc.) novel.
Bronx graduate student Colette McGovern decides to write her senior theology thesis on the Council of Trent, a historically important but bewilderingly complex council that the Catholic Church staged in the mid-16th century, responding to Protestant calls for reform. She seems ambivalent about her spirituality; she wishes she could tell her mother—a devout Catholic who’s peculiarly enthusiastic about ecclesiastical Latin—that she no longer wishes to attend weekly mass, as Simone de Beauvoir once defiantly told hers. Then Colette has an emotionally arresting dream in which Pope Paul II sinks mysteriously into the earth, wearing “soft robes” that feel “gentle and feminine” to her; it’s an experience so haunting that she seeks interpretive assistance from the campus counselor. Colette tries to find a way to understand the Council of Trent, and Catholicism at large, as being hospitable to feminine life, but she consistently encounters sexism: “The Church seems to have spent the last two thousand years shoring up a male hierarchy. So much time was spent arguing over the Immaculate Conception and all the rest that seems like myth and nonsense to eternally define the female.” Her dreams become more erotically charged, and her study of Trent more personal, as she begins to find spiritual inspiration in Giovanni Boccaccio’s 1374 biographical collection Famous Women. Throughout this novel, McCullagh displays impressive erudition, confidently traversing a broad swath of intellectual history with aplomb. He also palpably depicts Colette’s spiritual turmoil, sensitively portraying it in the context of the death of her father and in her emotional struggle with a past abortion. In addition, the author puts forward provocative questions about the place of women in Catholicism. However, the prose style can be overwrought and overly academic at times. As suggested by the subtitle—A Psychological, Religious, and Historical Novel—the work seems to be driven more by the need to conduct a philosophical inquiry than to craft a dramatic plot.
An intelligent but fictionally unspectacular drama.Pub Date: May 20, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-979059-90-9
Page Count: 248
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 2, 2018
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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