A familiar tale, but one that has a melodramatic sincerity.
In Flerlage’s (Before Bethlehem, 2012) short novel, a woman cleaning up a cellar finds a keepsake that conjures painful memories of love and loss.
When Lucy gets the “coveted chore” of sweeping her grandfather Landon Myers’ cellar, she expects to find nothing more than dust and mouse droppings there. She does find a couple of dead mice, and even a snakeskin, but the real discovery is an old baseball. She can tell right away that it means something to her grandfather: “As he took it, his heart raced; sweat formed above his thin white eyebrows.” After he collects himself, he tells Lucy the story of the ball, and of his life before he married her grandmother. In 1975, Landon was a celebrated pediatric oncologist, recently divorced, and the father of a young son, Alex. As per the custody agreement, Landon saw his child on weekends, which they spent going to Cincinnati Reds games—Alex was a huge fan—and at one game, he caught a foul ball, barehanded. Lucy later asks her grandfather why he’d kept his first marriage, and Alex, a secret: “I had to compartmentalize my life into two existences in order to help me to heal,” he says. Back in 1975, Alex was ill; he was experiencing headaches and issues with his vision. An angiogram confirmed what Landon feared: a brain tumor. The irony of a doctor who saves children’s lives but can’t save his own son’s isn’t lost on Flerlage; in fact, he even titles a chapter “Tragic Irony,” and later, he has Landon’s ex-wife, Marilyn, say that the loss of Alex will hurt Landon the most “because he, of all people, can’t save our son.” Suffice it to say that the book lacks subtlety, and it has the sentimental tone and flavor of a film on the Hallmark Channel. That said, it also tells an unusually affecting story. Overall, this is an earnest, unpretentious book that, despite overly deliberate grabs for the heartstrings, still manages to pluck them, all the same.
A familiar tale, but one that has a melodramatic sincerity.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-0-9898281-2-3
Page Count: 133
Publisher: DreamScapes Publishing Ltd
Review Posted Online: Dec. 2, 2019
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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