Continuing to show the nervy, offbeat wit first seen in Further Adventures (1993), Fink here tackles a more ambitious subject—the power of televangelists and the commingling of commerce and religion—with far less success. Fresh from USC business school, entrepreneur Alex Berry has product ideas galore but no money. When plans for the ``Odo-bag,'' a portable sachet in a variety of scents, wither beneath the scorn of a potential investor, Alex comes back to earth, latching onto the design for a miracle machine: a down-home processor capable of turning compost into feed, paper into fuel, waste into fertilizer, and, most importantly, raw ingredients into sausage—all by using interchangeable parts. Named the Humpty Dumpster, it catches the eye of evangelist Jim Tickell, who has a reputation not only for wildly successful fund drives for his TV ministry but also for divine inspiration in picking business ventures. Poised to take over a rundown pig farm, JT sees in Alex's idea just what's needed to make another commercial killing, so the two become partners. At first the Dumpster and Hummingbird Farm sausages exceed expectations, but a critical sales pitch goes awry at a Sacramento revival meeting when carelessness causes pig feces to be ground into sausage sampled by Iowa pig farmers, laying them low. Meanwhile, JT's erratic behavior has so estranged him from his wife that she sleeps with Alex, and when an earthquake swallows the farm, JT vanishes, too, leaving Alex to take the heat for the tainted sausage. In time, Alex recovers enough to marry JT's now ex-wife and start a family, but fortune will smile less benignly on JT. Complex plotting and a detailed treatment of fundamentalist tenets make for heavy going, but they also create a provocative tale, leaving little doubt that this is a writer to be reckoned with.
Pub Date: April 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-224-04081-2
Page Count: 324
Publisher: Jonathan Cape/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
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
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