Two novellas from Strong (Secret Words, 1992, etc.)—one about family secrets, the other about a man who lives alone across an alleyway from another man with a similar name: gentle, warmhearted fictions, the former is a bit cluttered and repetitious, while the latter plays to Strong's best suit—his ability to evoke the pleasures of loneliness. In ``Doing and Undoing,'' two brothers, Daniel and Sim Poore, take a five-day trip back to their childhood home—their grandmother's large house in Illinois farmland that has since become a monastery. Strong pairs off chapters—Sim's dreams, Dan's dreams, Sim's thoughts, Dan's thoughts, conversations between various family members—to tell his story. It can be magical at times, especially when sometimes-painful memories are juxtaposed with Dan's childhood made-up country of Tannu Tuva; but it can also be self-indulgent, particularly when Strong lapses into a modified stream-of-consciousness that tends to clutter up rather than clarify the family saga. While we're brought discursively and intimately into the family circle, the narrative finally gets tedious, especially since it inevitably curls back upon itself to try to dramatize the necessity of traveling back and forth in time. ``Game of Spirit,'' however, takes us all the way back to Strong's early style in Tike and Five Stories (1969): it's about Lou, who lives across the alley from Lew, and who meets an engaging assortment of neighbors since he lives alone (``It is warm now up to his belly button. Black floorboards, dark green rug, the book piles...''), checking out ten books a day, all the people once in his life ``long gone from here'' until, finally, ``He forgets if he is Lou or Lew.'' A charming, moving update on spacey 60's types, then, is delivered with an incisive work-a-day style, whereas ``Doing and Undoing'' is both more ambitious and less successful.
Pub Date: April 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-944072-28-3
Page Count: 232
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 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
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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