A postmodern mess of a debut: earnest and ambitious, but disjointed and strained. Middle-aged T.C. Chai is a former Chinese Red Guard whose father died in the Korean War. Although Chai lived through the Three Bad Years of 1959-61 and the great Cultural Revolution, and swam across the Deep Water Bay en route from China to Hong Kong to America, he is still haunted not by these experiences so much as by a horrific incident from his collegiate Red Guard days. Even when firmly established in Manhattan as a financial analyst for an investment bank, with a lovely wife (also Chinese) and a daughter, and thoroughly entrenched in upper-middle-class urban society (Scrabble, dinner parties, shopping), Chai can't come to terms with ``the rape.'' Years ago, Chai's group of Guards had been bent on harassing a ``counterrevolutionary'' history professor. The group's leader, Yu, convinced his companions, including Chai, not only to destroy the professor's house and grounds but to assault the professor's teenage daughter. Though Chai had only pretended to rape the girl, his guilt as a participant and silent bystander runs deep; in his anguish, he draws a parallel between the rape and the Cultural Revolution, which unleashed an unfocused, irrational ``lust to destroy'' within the nation. Chai's troubled past has contributed to his fascination with ``dead thinkers,'' including Dr. Samuel Johnson, but it is the relatively obscure, seldom- studied Calvin Coolidge who becomes Chai's obsession, and it is Coolidge's voice and spirit that guide him in his transition into American life and in his struggle to come to grips with his past. The trouble isn't just that the story itself, however intense in background, is so slight but that the Coolidge hook—which is meant to make everything else resonate—is dull and confusing and just doesn't lift when lifting is needed.
Pub Date: March 14, 1996
ISBN: 0-312-14044-4
Page Count: 272
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1996
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
