On her way home from an abortion she never wanted, a young lawyer pauses in the middle of the Boston Common to shoot her lover, another associate at her firm, wounding him slightly and setting in motion the most anemic courtroom drama in years. Why did Alison Moore, having purchased a handgun two weeks earlier, suddenly turn on Jack Donnelly? A series of brief, but interminable, flashbacks shows Alison's dependence from an early age on men's approval, her despondency over her failure to get work as an actress, and her turning to law school in desperation. Along the way, she had liaisons with a series of users and losers, including Jack, who emerges as cold, selfish, and emotionally sterile. As the trial date looms, Alison's bulldog lawyer, Lee Klein, realizes that everybody, from the anti-abortion activists who've made Alison their latest poster girl to the pro-choice feminists who seek Jack's head on a stick, ``wanted Alison to be a victim''—and so does Lee, because it's the only way she'll get her off. So Lee digs up an expert—evidently the only expert—on post- abortion syndrome and sets out to portray Alison as the helpless victim of Jack's passive abuse. Frozen out by his old colleagues at the firm, wondering forlornly why it's his behavior that's been put on trial, Jack is a sitting duck for Lee's slashing cross- examination. But don't expect any surprises in the courtroom sequences or afterwards. Since this inoffensive first novel never looks very hard at any of the hot-button issues it raises, you realize after a while that nothing is ever going to happen; you're trapped in a Beantown revival of Waiting for Lorena. Living proof that truth is stranger than fiction.
Pub Date: May 11, 1994
ISBN: 0-517-59606-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1994
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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