George Cartwright—a little-known 18th-century explorer, trapper, and author of A Journal of Transactions and Events During a Residency of Nearly Sixteen Years on the Coast of Labrador—died of old age at home in England in May 1819. In a stunningly rich and delicate first novel, Canadian poet Steffler posits and follows Cartwright's ghost of 170 years as it wanders the English roads in the spring of his death and reflects on a passionate life gone oddly awry at every turn. For Steffler's Cartwright—one of ten children raised by a country squire—the purpose of life itself became the pristine, powerful, perilous wilderness that he was among the first Englishmen to visit in Newfoundland and Labrador in the 1770's. Having hired ships and crew, Cartwright planned to collect furs and other bounty and return home a rich man. Instead, he fell in love with the rivers and forests, the hunting, trapping, and fishing, and the native peoples of the mountainous Labrador coast. But he couldn't build a life: The punishing winters killed his crews, fires burned his storehouses, and the ships he hired for return trips were lost or damaged. In one heartrending series of mishaps, the beloved Eskimos Cartwright brings to London as cynical inducements to his creditors to be lenient contract smallpox; they die horrible deaths on the journey back and spread the pestilence to the New World. Finally, pirates invade Cartwright's renewed stocks of furs, his workers mutiny, and even his loyal, stalwart English mistress rebels against his self-absorption, and Cartwright, bewildered, returns to England. There, he becomes a florid, tale-telling barracks-master. Steffler, however, lovingly gives him a second life—one in which, as he wanders alone through the perpetual English spring of his youth, he is permitted to discover his intentions and his mistakes and finally to die nobly, as he might have done in Labrador. Based in part on Cartwright's Journal, a keen, richly hued, and utterly enchanting imaginative reconstruction of a life.
Pub Date: May 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-8050-2462-X
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1993
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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