Acclaimed historical novelist Vernon (Peter Doyle, 1991, etc.) re-creates the story of real-life Baby Doe Taborsilver-miner, upwardly mobile ``loose woman,'' wife of the richest miner in 19th- century Colorado. Born in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, in the late 1850s, Baby McCourt grows up beautiful and pampered, with a sensual nature. As a teen, she dreams of dancing on stage and wins the local skating contest; later, she goes on to marry Harvey Doe and move to Colorado, where she gets written up in the newspaper as the first woman to actually work in a mine. Eventually, Baby leaves drunkard Harvey, though, and gleefully takes a string of lovers, matter-of-factly noting their bedroom prowess, or lack thereof. Then she snags immense, smelly Horace ``Haw'' Tabor (``His thick hairy body inspired disgust, but disgust made Baby...amorously inclined''), the wildly rich owner of multiple mines. By unscrupulous means, Haw and Baby discard their spouses and throw a gaudy wedding attended by President Chester Arthur. Over the years, the two flaunt the trappings of their seemingly limitless wealthwith showy accessories including two daughters, Cupid and Silver Dollar, wolfhound puppies, and peacocks on the lawn. But Haw dies broke, Silver meets her own horrible end, and Baby lives to cantankerous old age in a filthy shack by the shaft of one of their mines under the beneficent care of a hobo named Sue. Through it all, though Vernon's surefooted, free-associative prose often dazzles, the effect is of an exotic spectacle rather than a resonant drama: The characters, their bodily sensations, and vaguely conceived desires are conveyed vividly, as is the dirty, dangerous, greed-inspiring Colorado landscape, but the pain of their losses is rendered much more elliptically than their conquests and triumphs. A high-color portrait that's viscerally powerful but emotionally flat.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-684-80371-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1995
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
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