Tula Springs is always worth a visit, but this is minor Wilcox.
The gently mad inhabitants of fictional Tula Springs are doing what they do best—minding one another’s business—in the sly Louisiana author’s amiable eighth outing.
Old acquaintances from Modern Baptists (1983), North Gladiola (1985), and elsewhere pop up intermittently in a ramshackle narrative that revolves around the appealing figure of middle-aged Lou(ise) Jones. She’s a former college music-teacher now underemployed (but better paid) as receptionist at the local Christian health club WaistWatch—and unhappily separated from loving husband Don, who’s guarding his parents’ home from an untrustworthy tenant and a belligerent lesbian couple, among others. The story meanders along introducing folks who swim into the Jones’s orbit, including Lou’s overachieving housemaid Alpha (a pivotal figure who never appears), Alpha’s supernaturally fastidious American-African mother Mrs. Ompala, Lou’s pot-smoking gal pal Grady Morgen, and her WaistWatch superiors, febrile and neurasthenic Maigrite and muscular Christian workout guru Brother Moodie. Nobody does much more than posture and fret, partial exceptions being pistol-packing tax assessor Mrs. Melvin Tudie and Snopes-like miscreant F.X. Pickens. The plots that more or less engage them all have to do with a hotly contested academic post, an antique dresser, a jealous octogenarian husband stalking his fugitive bride in a golf cart, and Lou’s vacillating fixations on her own manic-depressive marital state, career crises, and family history. It sounds like fun, but isn’t really, because Wilcox jumps from one oddball character and ludicrous situation to another without bothering to develop anything or anyone credibly. The best features of Heavenly Days are its delicious throwaway lines (“ . . . he was too lazy to pick his own nose”) and non sequiturs (when somebody “wants to know if her notes on Hittite phalli are in her top dresser drawer,” it seems a perfectly reasonably thing to say).
Tula Springs is always worth a visit, but this is minor Wilcox.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2003
ISBN: 0-670-03247-6
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2003
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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