A first collection of 14 stories that peoples a southwestern landscape with female survivors of one kind of abuse or another. At her best, Coleman can evoke the haunted landscape and the domestic discord of a Frostian dramatic poem or the passionate bitterness of a Lawrentian short story. ``Sunflower'' concerns a female narrator and her husband Clay, who have found a weary acceptance of each other after her passionate youth and catastrophic tryst with young lover Miguel (``I never felt I could ask him [Clay] where the joy went...''). Likewise, in ``The Voices of Doves,'' the narrator, a bereaved mother who lost her infant—one of many children—when her illiterate helper oiled the baby accidentally with carbolic acid, reaches a reconciliation with the girl after a lonely recognition of a kind of fate that is bound up in the land: ``There is a violence in this soil, in the people who labor on it.'' ``Mesa Country,'' on the other hand, is sparse and Lawrentian: ``We live in tumult. Everyone.'' Other stories are more typically feminist and lyrical in their intent and execution: ``The Paseo'' lovingly evokes in ``a silent marketplace'' a promenade of women ``wrapped around their pearls'' and a male narrator who wants to paint one of the young beauties, but whose downfall involves both the local culture and his own unacknowledged desires. In ``The Ugliest Woman in the World,'' the narrator runs off with wild macho man Buck, only to come to her senses, faced with his selfishness, and leave him. A woman in ``Acts of Mercy'' rides off on a horse to help a neighbor faced with wild dogs—the men here are absent and finally unnecessary. Coleman's stories—some published in such journals as South Dakota Review and Puerto Del Sol—evoke a harsh natural and man- dominated world where women sometimes become strong through their suffering.
Pub Date: Nov. 30, 1991
ISBN: 0-8040-0949-X
Page Count: 151
Publisher: Ohio Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1991
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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