A sensitive, haunting debut collection. Winner of the John Simmons Short Fiction Award. (Also see Feitell, below.)
Ten remarkably accomplished stories explore the painful rips in life’s fabric.
Three of the strongest pieces appeared in The New Yorker. “Where We All Should Have Been” arrives at a subtle, complicated ending after a woman is called back to Kansas City by her recently widowed mother to help with her defiant 16-year-old sister, who’s getting in over her head with booze and men. In “The Good Fight,” Liza, whose husband is divorcing her for his 20-year-old Japanese student, sits in a Chicago bar with an old friend who’s in love with a 20-year-old himself; Liza discovers the line between words and touch (“It was true; his touch did ease her . . . . Maybe that was what terror would teach her, that the language of feeling was unspoken, a language of gesture, of limbs and organs”), and in “Everyone Is Wearing a Hat,” a couple’s eight-year-old son has been killed in a hit-and-run accident. The mother’s grief is expressed in poignant and poetic language: “That is what I had wanted to mourn—the loss of his touch, his weight, the small light bones that had grown and passed through my own body.” In the sketchier “Mothers Without Children,” women whose children have been stolen by their ex-husbands share horror stories. The power of sibling bonds lies at the heart of “After Rosa Parks,” about a Vietnam-era veteran who provides support for his sister—a single mother—and his kindergarten-age nephew; and at the heart of “Who Knows More Than You,” where an older sister is a phone confidante for Bette, who discovers that her five-year-old daughter has been beaten by her babysitter. (“ ‘Twenty-five years I spent on red alert before I relaxed,’ Bette said. ‘Always certain the worst could happen. And I get blindsided by a woman named Penny.’ ”).
A sensitive, haunting debut collection. Winner of the John Simmons Short Fiction Award. (Also see Feitell, below.)Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-87745-910-X
Page Count: 140
Publisher: Univ. of Iowa
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2004
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
