A pleasing introduction to a very interesting writer’s several “worlds.”
Retellings of familiar stories and bizarre dystopian visions, in 15 stories by the popular author better known for such SF and fantasy novels as Aegypt (1987) and Little, Big (1981).
Crowley’s lucid style and mastery of linear narrative function most effectively in a lovely adaptation of a medieval folktale about fairy siblings who cannot both survive in the human world (“The Green Child”) and in his unsparing version of the story of the seal-man (“silkie”) who takes a mortal wife (“An Earthly Woman Sits and Sings”). Other classic figures appear, intriguingly transposed, in a reimagining of Adam and Eve’s “fall” into knowledge (“The Nightingale Sings at Night”), Lord Byron’s report of an encounter between humans and a beleaguered satyr (“Missolonghi 1824”), and an anecdote about an urban writer’s unexpected meeting with Virginia Woolf, whose “immortality” ironically makes her an avatar of an increasingly rapidly disappearing past (“The Reason for the Visit”). Of the more purely speculative stories, “Novelty” wrestles with a blocked writer’s vacillations between retaining “secure” memories of his usable past and daring to stretch it imaginatively; “Gone” wryly depicts a suburban mom’s uneasy accommodation to a brave new world staffed—and alarmingly altered—by industrious extraterrestrials; and “In Blue” introduces a depressed protagonist stuck in a ruthlessly streamlined post-revolutionary future that has consigned history to oblivion. The latter story’s core idea is treated more interestingly in the superb novella “Great Work of Time,” which blends the tale of a mad inventor’s quest to enrich himself via time travel with a fantasy about African explorer Cecil Rhodes’s creation of a secret society (“The Otherhood”) dedicated to “preserve and extend the British Empire.” Even better is “Antiquities,” in which Britain’s conquest of Egypt stirs up malignant shape-shifting avengers.
A pleasing introduction to a very interesting writer’s several “worlds.”Pub Date: May 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-380-73106-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
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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