A sitcom praying hard for the leap to romantic comedy.
Standard love story exploring standard love in a generic New York City.
Jack’s a wannabe writer with a true calling as a banker, Sarah’s a musician who sunlights as a lawyer. The two meet at a mutual friend’s wedding that’s exactly the wrong balm for Jack, who is still smarting from Kim, his last break-up, and lamenting the dismal New York City dating scene. The two don’t hook up then, but they miraculously encounter one another at a birthday party a week later. Still, fateful or not, it will take a good bit of accidental hard-to-get and a number of discussions full of quasi-love-wisdom among lonely, uninspired, forgettable minor characters before Jack and Sarah become the center of each other’s universes. And even then they’ll have to get past little things like Jack’s insistence that hundred year-old paintings of nudes are essentially like the Playboy magazine of the 19th-century. A dinner date is in the offing, but what will happen when the chocolate-haired Kim returns to the scene of the crime via a chance encounter that starts as an argument on the B-line and winds up in a bedroom? Will Kim find a way to intrude on the pending date? How will Sarah react—after all, she’s a woman with options. This isn’t even Moonstruck, but “There is a light that hovers over Manhattan at night—a bright, expansive, incandescent glow that seems to float somewhere between the top of the city and the sky,” and that glow spells l-o-v-e. Newcomer Dearie’s fast-food writing—all plot-driven, all dependent on outrageous coincidences—will go over well with folks whose only hope in life is the lottery. In fact, one could imagine this one having been cut-and-pasted from other like novels, and people loving it just for that reason.
A sitcom praying hard for the leap to romantic comedy.Pub Date: July 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-670-03219-0
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2003
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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