Horse whispering and horse murdering roil an intrigue-drenched race track in this atmospheric young-adult mystery.
Yes, there’s manure-shoveling, but 16-year-old Kelsey Kelley finds many consolations in her summer job as a stable hand on the quarter-horse racing circuit. One is the gorgeous, blonde-maned stallion Tomar El Oro she tends and bonds with; another is Blaine Carthege, the dreamy security guard at Derbyrun Downs racetrack in Colorado. Then skullduggery erupts as if from the starting gate. Kelsey overhears conspirators scheming to bribe a jockey to throw a race, Tomar gets sick, another horse dies, possibly with the aid of battery acid, and the track is quarantined after an outbreak of vesicular stomatitis. During the 30-day lockdown, Derbyrun Downs seethes with rumors of a horse-killer, insurance fraud and vendettas between rival trainers. As she guards Tomar from unknown perils, Kelsey is suspicious of everyone—even Blaine, despite the tingling feeling she gets when he’s around. When Kelsey’s father shows up with his new wife, just five years after he abandoned her and her mom, she feels torn between extreme pique—“You are just a no good rotten lousy sleazy adulterer!”—and curiosity at the change her dad’s newfound Christian faith seems to have wrought. Despite this mounting tension, the ensuing mystery never gets a good grip, even though it embroils Kelsey in kidnapping and homicide. Plot devices feel more perfunctory than suspenseful, and characters who seem guilty from the start just keep getting guiltier. Fortunately, Off keeps horse-lovers entertained with a vivid panorama of the racing world and lots of equine lore, from the animals’ skittish behavioral quirks to their complex diets to the thrill a rider feels when her mount breaks into a gallop. Kelsey is an appealing, spunky heroine, even as readers watch her try to keep from being thrown by a lurching storyline. The suspense plot pulls up lame, but horse-obsessed teen readers will enjoy the novel’s engrossing equine milieu.
Pub Date: March 30, 2010
ISBN: 978-1615799497
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Xulon
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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