It’s a pleasure following Fanny and Dora on this breezy, funny tour of beautiful places.
An amusing fictional travelogue of two British spinsters on a South American adventure.
Fanny is enjoying a quiet life in a small English village when her friend Dora shakes up her routine with an invitation for a six-week trip to the other side of the world. Dora tries to reassure her by saying that her nephew John and his boyfriend had been on a similar trip and said it was “perfectly manageable.” Fanny isn’t the adventurous sort, but she surprises herself by saying yes, despite her misgivings. With small suitcases in tow, the two embark on a whirlwind tour of multiple cities in Brazil, Argentina, Chile (including Easter Island), and Peru. The pair are slightly behind the times regarding the use of technology—“You ordered a book from the Amazon? How interesting”—but the author takes a more modern approach to the elderly-British-women-overseas trope. Aside from a few exclamations of “how exotic!,” he shows Dora and Fanny to be respectful, engaged travelers who take time to enjoy the beauty of their surroundings, such as staying up late on Christmas to watch candle-lit paper balloons being released over a lake in San Carlos de Bariloche in the province of Río Negro, Argentina. There are no grand epiphanies in this novel—just the ordinary pleasures of gratitude, lifelong learning, and friendships that deepen from a shared experience in a new setting. Handwritten notes across the typeset pages lend authenticity to the overall journal theme, and cheeky humor abounds. The two friends also play off each other well: Dora, described as “overly tall” and often criticized for towering “over people in more ways than one,” turns out to be an enthusiastic navigator who knows how to use a selfie stick; Fanny, a short, “hearty woman who could easily put back a good cream tea,” charms with her infectious sense of joie de vivre.
It’s a pleasure following Fanny and Dora on this breezy, funny tour of beautiful places.Pub Date: Oct. 30, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5368-0627-4
Page Count: 160
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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