A first novel that fails in every respect—plot, characterization and language mangled beyond belief.
Cheesy melodrama about a plastic surgeon, 9/11, AIDS, blackmail and revenge.
Dr. Richard Gallin is off his game. The Park Avenue plastic surgeon has scaled back his procedures drastically; he pads around his office barefoot. It’s January 2002, and the doctor is still disoriented after the death of his son Bernardo on 9/11. The insurance money (millions!) has come through for his widow Karin, but her husband’s wedding ring was all that was retrieved from the Twin Towers. And something else is pressing on Gallin. A journalist, Nick Adams, is threatening to write an exposé about him even though there’s no dirt, unless you count his promiscuity years ago, after his wife’s death from cancer. Adams comes to the office. He’s a redhead, and that damns him; Gallin believes all redheaded males are dishonest. What’s motivating Adams is Gallin’s dismissal of his nurse Peter, who had volunteered that he was HIV positive; Adams is Peter’s lover. Gallin can handle this, but can he handle the return of Bernardo? For his son is alive! Escaping the inferno, and realizing he no longer loved his wife (hence the discarded ring), Bernardo hightailed it to Florida. Now he’s back, asking his father to change his appearance. Since he’d already created a new identity in Florida, this makes no sense; nor does it make sense that Gallin would consent to the surgery, thus participating in insurance fraud, or re-hire Peter to help him. Making sense, though, was never a consideration for a writer who values excess above everything. That excess feeds on itself when Gallin is mugged, and then hires his mugger to take care of Adams, which he does, brutally. When the mugger shows up to claim his reward (ten grand, plus surgery for his own sorry self), the story comes to a sudden halt, a resolution seemingly impossible.
A first novel that fails in every respect—plot, characterization and language mangled beyond belief.Pub Date: April 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-57962-196-4
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Permanent Press
Review Posted Online: June 20, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2010
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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