Here and there, A Desert in Bohemia provokes and moves. But it’s a novel that ought to have had a much sharper edge:...
Well-known for both her YA and adult fiction (The Serpentine Cave, 1997, etc.), Walsh paints her most crowded canvas yet in this ambitious tale of two countries—one real, one invented—in the wake of WWII and through the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1990.
Fictional Comenia (an alternative Czechoslovakia, whose natives in fact speak Czech) is the primary theater for the story’s operations, which exfoliate from the ousting of Count Michael Blansky from his ancestral castle (by Communist “revolutionaries”) and the emigration of Blansky’s neighbor, the tradesman Frantisek, to England. Walsh focuses in turn on nine individuals variously affiliated with these two principals and afflicted by their country’s 40-year experience of Communist domination. They include the Count’s distracted sister Anna, a victim of the war for long afterward; Hedva, the villager whose avaricious resentment of her “betters” makes her all but indistinguishable from their country’s oppressors; Blansky’s son Pavel, another emigrant who becomes fully anglicized in the sanctuary provided by his father’s wealth, and Pavel’s daughter Kate, drawn compulsively back toward Comenia by her love for her distant cousin Tomas; and Eliska, a hopeful young woman both matured and compromised by her infatuation with Jiri, a fiery Communist ideologue. Walsh works hard, and occasionally to powerful effect, in demonstrating how these and other characters are shaped and limited by exterior circumstance. Unfortunately, the contrived manner in which most of them (more than a little unbelievably) prevail suggests that her allusive title (from Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale) all too accurately forecasts romance-like patterns and resolutions in a place that never existed.
Here and there, A Desert in Bohemia provokes and moves. But it’s a novel that ought to have had a much sharper edge: altogether, a disappointing successor to the better of Walsh’s books for grownups.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-312-26263-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2000
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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