The “mystery” here reflects larger truths and keeps pages turning, but the texture, character and observation Williams gives...
Sharp and funny rock ’n’ roll elegy to youth and a disappearing way of life as Wales joins Europe’s shiny future.
Unfolding simultaneously in 1980 and 1999, the story continues Williams’s fond and vivid portrait of Cardiff, last seen in his collection Five Pubs, Two Bars and a Nightclub (1999), this time with the tale of the Wurriyas, a one-hit ska band. After nearly 20 years, ex-Wurriyas guitarist (and womanizer—art students and “little Goth girls” mostly) Mazz, approaching 40, returns to Cardiff, where his career began. While Mazz toured with second-billed bands, erstwhile singer Bobby, now a lesbian pimp, bassist Tyra, now a single mom, and guitarist Col all remained, as did Charlie Unger, drummer, local character, washed-up prizefighter, and Tyra’s absentee dad, whose death brings them all together again. In 1980, with Bobby Sands’s hunger strike in the background, the band went from local pubs to a brief moment in the spotlight, while Mazz and Tyra fell in love. When Tyra ended a pregnancy, though, they gave up as the band fell apart. In 1999, Mazz and Tyra, both lonely and aware of their age, fall together as they pursue the odd circumstances of Charlie’s death. Scarily thuggish but goodhearted Jason Flaherty, once the Wurriyas’s manager, is now a real-estate developer riding high on Cardiff’s building boom, which is turning the gritty docks and pubs of the Wurriyas’s heyday into a touristy waterfront mall. He pays Mazz to find the band’s drummer Emyr, who has famously disappeared but was seen with Charlie shortly before his death. While making a go of it with Tyra, Mazz tours the surfing beaches of Wales, where rumor places Emyr, and uncovers the heartless real-estate maneuvering that led to the death of Charlie (and the Cardiff he once knew).
The “mystery” here reflects larger truths and keeps pages turning, but the texture, character and observation Williams gives us are by themselves captivating and rewarding enough.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2001
ISBN: 1-58234-145-1
Page Count: 250
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2001
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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