Forty-two short-shorts, collected from two volumes originally published in France, chronicle a childhood and adolescence in Des Moines, Iowa. Together, the stories work like a snapshot album, with the life that's put on display full of odd Spoon River Anthology-like portraits but little real conflict. ``The images blend, overlap,'' Taylor writes in the penultimate piece, ``The View from the Upper Window.'' Otherwise, he describes in his own voice the loss of relatives and friends he grew up with in the 50's and 60's. In these evocative vignettes, instances are rendered vividly but never developed. Flipping through the snapshots is like glimpsing a life through anecdotes: ``Childhood Playmates'' (``My first death was Bud, Nancy's father''); ``Goodwin'' (``a mental genius and physical moron''); ``Nana'' (a woman whose ``friends began dying, one after another''); ``Tower Park'' (sketch of a place off-limits to a child, and thus all the more alluring and mythological); ``Andy Bill'' (a suicide); and the elegiac ``Words of Farewell'' (``friends who came into my life only to say good-bye and leave''). Other pieces, set in the present, allow characters to look back from a different perspective: in ``A Conversation,'' for instance, Taylor and his siblings talk about Des Moines, where their father still lives, and one sibling finally asks Taylor the crucial question—``Would you like to be buried there?'' Most of the stories come back to the theme of mortality: at their best, they're quirky and original, as in ``Breakfast with Casey Stengel.'' But finally, whether flat or inventive, they're all like ``The Fond Memory,'' prose poems that enshrine small moments from the author's past in piecemeal fashion. The entire collection, though undramatic, is a sort of Ray Bradbury Dandelion Wine remembrance of the Midwest as a golden place, a green world that lives on only in memory.
Pub Date: April 30, 1992
ISBN: 0-934257-69-8
Page Count: 144
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1992
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
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
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