Should have an emotional weight and impact, but Goldstein’s first fails to move.
A feisty grandmother and Holocaust survivor takes charge of her suicidal grandchild.
Twentysomething Jennifer, found unconscious on the beach in Venice, California, is rushed to the hospital; when she wakes up, she finds that her nana, Gabby, has flown from New York to be by her side. Jennifer’s boyfriend, we learn, had asked her to move out, and as a result she’d taken what she hoped was a lethal dose of Xanax and alcohol. No one seemed to care about her: her father, with a new wife and baby, wasn’t interested in her; and her mother had been killed in an accident on the way to Jennifer’s high school graduation. As for Gabby, her lungs are shot from smoking—she’s got bad emphysema—but she loves life and is determined to find good where she can. Haunted by her own past—she saw her parents and sister killed by the Nazis, went into hiding in a brave Polish woman’s attic and, when betrayed, was saved by partisans—she is the more determined to ensure that Jennifer has a future. After persuading Jennifer’s doctors—and her father, a Hollywood producer—that she can take care of the girl in New York and bring her back to health, the two fly east and Jennifer, reluctantly, moves in with Gabby. Initially, Jennifer resists help, but Gabby, despite her frail health, plans activities she hopes will cheer Jennifer: they clean stables, attend plays, walk in Central Park. Jennifer is still depressed and hasn’t abandoned the idea of suicide, but Gabby has her own survival stratagems, including a car trip to Bar Harbor, Maine, a place that has long held special meaning for her. There, though her own health deteriorates, she makes a final pitch for Jennifer’s life.
Should have an emotional weight and impact, but Goldstein’s first fails to move.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2004
ISBN: 1-4013-0110-X
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these...
Figuratively and literally shattering moments of hoRRRRRipilication in Chamberlain, Maine where stones fly from the sky rather than from the hands of the villagers (as they did in "The Lottery," although the latter are equal to other forms of persecution).
All beginning when Carrie White discovers a gift with telekinetic powers (later established as a genetic fact), after she menstruates in full ignorance of the process and thinks she is bleeding to death while the other monsters in the high school locker room bait and bully her mercilessly. Carrie is the only child of a fundamentalist freak mother who has brought her up with a concept of sin which no blood of the Lamb can wash clean. In addition to a sympathetic principal and gym teacher, there's one girl who wishes to atone and turns her date for the spring ball over to Carrie who for the first time is happy, beautiful and acknowledged as such. But there will be hell to pay for this success—not only her mother but two youngsters who douse her in buckets of fresh-killed pig blood so that Carrie once again uses her "wild talent," flexes her mind and a complete catastrophe (explosion and an uncontrolled fire) virtually destroys the town.
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these youngsters who once ate peanut butter now scrawl "Carrie White eats shit." But as they still say around here, "Sit a spell and collect yourself."Pub Date: April 8, 1974
ISBN: 0385086954
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1974
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
Despite getting a little preachy toward the end, Leary has largely achieved a genuinely funny novel about alcoholism.
A supposedly recovering alcoholic real estate agent tells her not-exactly-trustworthy version of life in her small New England town in this tragicomic novel by Leary (Outtakes from a Marriage, 2008, etc.).
Sixty-year-old Hildy Good, a divorced realtor who has lived all her life in Wendover on the Massachusetts North Shore, proudly points to having an ancestor burned at the stake at the Salem witch trials. In fact, her party trick is to do psychic readings using subtle suggestions and observational skills honed by selling homes. At first, the novel seems to center on Hildy’s insights about her Wendover neighbors, particularly her recent client Rebecca McAllister, a high-strung young woman who has moved into a local mansion with her businessman husband and two adopted sons. Hildy witnesses Rebecca having trouble fitting in with other mothers, visiting the local psychiatrist Peter Newbold, who rents an office above Hildy’s, and winning a local horse show on her expensive new mount. Hildy is acerbically funny and insightful about her neighbors; many, like her, are from old families whose wealth has evaporated. She becomes Rebecca’s confidante about the affair Rebecca is having with Peter, whom Hildy helped baby-sit when he was a lonely child. She helps another family who needs to sell their house to afford schooling for their special needs child. She begins an affair with local handyman Frankie Getchell, with whom she had a torrid romance as a teenager. But Hildy, who has recently spent a stint in rehab and joined AA after an intervention by her grown daughters, is not quite the jolly eccentric she appears. There are those glasses of wine she drinks alone at night, those morning headaches and memory lapses that are increasing in frequency. As both Rebecca’s and Hildy’s lives spin out of control, the tone darkens until it approaches tragedy. Throughout, Hildy is original, irresistibly likable and thoroughly untrustworthy.
Despite getting a little preachy toward the end, Leary has largely achieved a genuinely funny novel about alcoholism.Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-250-01554-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2012
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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