This prequel to the Lambda Awardwinning Living Upstairs (1993) finds 17-year-old Nathan Reed struggling on familiar ground- -with his family loyalties, his sexuality, and his vocation as a writer—back in 1941 L.A. Since his parents (a layabout father who dreams of beautiful music and works sporadically as a porter; a fortunetelling mother who's just been busted by the police) don't offer much in the way of nurture or support, it's only natural that Nathan would go looking elsewhere for a family: to Moon's CafÇ, where the staff of the Fair Oaks Junior College Monitor, overlooking his lower division status, take him to their collective bosom and press him to write a column for the paper; to the Harlequin theater, a fourth-floor loft where a cadre of Monitor regulars stage An Inspector Calls to critical acclaim and official harassment; and to a series of prospective lovers ranging from flirtatious ingenue Alex Morgan to disastrous Moon's waitress Sheila O'Hare to Fair Oaks instructor Kenneth Stone, an alleged Nazi spy, to mortuary organist Desmond Foley, whose weekend orgies are a town scandal, and to Nathan's old school friend Gene Woodhead, who returns from military school determined to pick up their sexual experiments where they'd left off. As in Living Upstairs, the storytelling is episodic and gracefully understated. This time, though, Nathan's rites of passage, lacking the retrospective inevitability of his later adventures, seem merely pro forma, a series of ritual hurdles he has to get over before he's ready for the infinitely more interesting adventures lying ahead. The final intrigue that winds up the story—a tragicomic shooting, a suicide, an elegiac confrontation—is forced and arbitrary. Familiar matters sensitively handled, with all the dated charm of a yellowing newspaper feature.
Pub Date: Jan. 9, 1995
ISBN: 0-525-93924-5
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1994
The Stand did less well than The Shining, and The Dead Zone will do less well than either—as the King of high horror (Carrie) continues to move away from the grand-gothic strain that once distinguished him from the other purveyors of psychic melodrama. Here he's taken on a political-suspense plot formula that others have done far better, giving it just the merest trappings of deviltry. Johnnie Smith of Cleaves Mills, Maine, is a super-psychic; after a four-year coma, he has woken up to find that he can see the future—all of it except for certain areas he calls the "dead zone." So Johnnie can do great things, like saving a friend from death-by-lightning or reuniting his doctor with long-lost relatives. But Johnnie also can see a horrible presidential candidate on the horizon. He's Mayor Gregory Aromas Stillson of Ridgeway, N.H., and only Johnnie knows that this apparently klutzy candidate is really the devil incarnate—that if Stillson is elected he'll become the new Hitler and plunge the world into atomic horror! What can Johnnie do? All he can do is try to assassinate this Satanic candidate—in a climactic shootout that is recycled and lackluster and not helped by King's clumsy social commentary (". . . it was as American as The Wonderful Worm of Disney"). Johnnie is a faceless hero, and never has King's banal, pulpy writing been so noticeable in its once-through-the-typewriter blather and carelessness. Yes, the King byline will ensure a sizeable turnout, but the word will soon get around that the author of Carrie has this time churned out a ho-hum dud.
Pub Date: Aug. 16, 1979
ISBN: 0451155750
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1979
Hilderbrand’s portrait of the upper-crust Tate clan through the years is so deliciously addictive that it will be the “It”...
Queen of the summer novel—how could she not be, with all her stories set on an island—Hilderbrand delivers a beguiling ninth (The Castaways, 2009, etc.), featuring romance and mystery on isolated Tuckernuck Island.
The Tate family has had a house on Tuckernuck (just off the coast of swanky Nantucket) for generations. It has been empty for years, but now Birdie wants to spend a quiet mother-daughter week there with Chess before Chess’s wedding to Michael Morgan. Then the unthinkable happens—perfect Chess (beautiful, rich, well-bred food editor of Glamorous Home) dumps the equally perfect Michael. She quits her job, leaves her New York apartment for Birdie’s home in New Canaan, and all without explanation. Then the unraveling continues: Michael dies in a rock-climbing accident, leaving Chess not quite a widow, but devastated, guilty, unreachable in the shell of herself. Birdie invites her younger daughter Tate (a pretty, naïve computer genius) and her own bohemian sister India, whose husband, world-renowned sculptor Bill Bishop, killed himself years ago, to Tuckernuck for the month of July, in the hopes that the three of them can break through to Chess. Hunky Barrett Lee is their caretaker, coming from Nantucket twice a day to bring groceries and take away laundry (idyllic Tuckernuck is remote—no phone, no hot water, no ferry) as he’s also inspiring renewed lust in Tate, who has had a crush on him since she was a kid. The author jumps between the four women—Tate and her blossoming relationship with Barrett, India and her relationship with Lula Simpson, a painter at the Academy where India is a curator, Birdie, who is surprised by the recent kindnesses of ex-husband Grant, and finally Chess, who in her journal is uncoiling the sordid, sad circumstances of her break with normal life and Michael’s death.
Hilderbrand’s portrait of the upper-crust Tate clan through the years is so deliciously addictive that it will be the “It” beach book of the summer.Pub Date: July 6, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-316-04387-8
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Reagan Arthur/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2010
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