Willett is trying for black comedy but doesn’t find the right blend of light and dark. Abby’s flip-flops, Dorcas’s puzzling...
Hidden behind that dumb title is a mildly creepy tale of misbegotten love and ultimate revenge, a second outing from Willett (Jenny and the Jaws of Life, 1987).
The action is set in Rhode Island in the 1970s. Abigail and Dorcas Mather are twins, born in 1938, and polar opposites, as we are reminded repeatedly. Dorcas is mind, Abigail is body. Dorcas, the narrator, who will become a head librarian, decides at age 12 that she will reserve her sensuality for books: “I yearned for duty the way Abigail yearned to show her ass.” And show it she does, one carousing night, to the football team, who promptly gang-rape her. Abigail is simply happy to be the center of attention. She’ll go on to a brief first marriage and motherhood (the twins raise daughter Anna together) before becoming a “mailman” and poisoning half the marriages in town. On her rounds, she meets Guy De Vilbiss, world-famous poet, and his sycophantic wife Hilda; the pear-shaped Guy and sheeplike Hilda come across as unprepossessing freaks. Through this couple, the twins meet Conrad Lowe, who will be their nemesis. Most famous for the exposé of his mother, an evil Hollywood diva, Conrad is a manipulative sadist, “ a ladies’ man who hated ladies.” While Dorcas reads him correctly, Abigail, though no masochist, falls in love with him, and Conrad relishes her as the perfect victim. On their honeymoon, Conrad chains the seriously overweight Abby to the bed and starves her. The marriage goes downhill from there, and Conrad even manages to humiliate the virtuous Dorcas sexually before Abby recovers her pride and runs Conrad over, eight times.
Willett is trying for black comedy but doesn’t find the right blend of light and dark. Abby’s flip-flops, Dorcas’s puzzling celibacy, and Conrad’s dated, Noel Coward–like Waspishness just don’t help.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-312-31181-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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