The promised sequel to The Planets, Boylan's 1991 saga of the sociopathic human menagerie of Centralia, Pa.—the town that sits atop a mine fire that's smoldered out of control since 1962—is just as mad, though by no means as magical. ``I wish you wanted me,'' unlovely teen Phoebe Harrison tells her long-deserted mother in a typed note she forgetfully leaves behind en route to the tattoo parlor one summer day. In no time at all, both Phoebe's uncle, Patrick Flinch, and Isabelle Smuggs, an inventive sculptor staying at the Flinches' find the note—and each, naturally, assumes it's from the other. Complications ensue, distracting the characters so effectively they don't even notice when Phoebe's older sister Demmie and her gum-chewing boyfriend Billings break in and rob the house. Next thing you know, it's three months later, and Phoebe's back in the home of her father, Wedley, and her hated stepmother, Vicki, a beautician who's still carrying on the world's least clandestine affair with Wedley's next-door neighbor Dwayne—an affair that will have a sudden, decisive impact on Phoebe's coiffure. Then it's winter, the season when Phoebe is reunited with her mother, and Isabelle, whose sculptural work up until now has mostly been a meticulously correct set of innards, opens the exhibit she hopes will make her fortune- -grotesquely decapitated heads of famous folks from Amelia Earhart to Barton Sumac, the avant-garde painter who asked her to pose over a period of weeks before producing an enormous painting of her breasts—only to have the treacherous painter himself steal the exhibit, setting the stage for a monumentally loopy mass kidnapping, extortion, etc. The seasonal metaphor and the unfolding of his characters' peccadilloes give Boylan's story the centrifugal force of a runaway comet; but gorgeously shaggy episodes too often peter off into blackout sketches before the long-awaited finale kicks in.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-679-43021-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
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
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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