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
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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