A tragic but ultimately uplifting tale of one woman battling personal demons.
A contemporary debut novel about a woman’s journey through mental illness.
As the book opens, Mimi Rizner finds herself in a psychiatric hospital. Unhappy to be locked up in the institution, she begins to reflect back on her life. Her earliest memories are of traveling around the country with her nomadic hippie parents. The narrative jumps around in time as Mimi goes back and forth between the present day, her teen years in San Francisco, and later on, her living with a man named Donny in Richmond. She believes her mental illness was caused by a ghost who entered her body while she was at the Woodstock music festival with her parents, and she hints at and later reveals details about the fact that it was an act of violence on her part that landed her in the psychiatric hospital. As she struggles to control the ghost in her, she has angry, sometimes violent outbursts at the hospital, a sign to the staff that she is not ready to be released. Mimi is a sympathetic first-person narrator even if readers will sometimes cringe at or be upset with her actions. Throughout her life, she has found release in painting, and this depiction of her as a tortured, troubled artist who sees things differently and feels things more deeply helps to make this sometimes-difficult character easier to appreciate. Despite a lack of action, the story moves briskly along, aided by jumps back and forth in time and curiosity about Mimi’s reputation for violence and her teenage romance. The anticlimatic ending offers a simple, satisfying conclusion to her journey. In some of her narration, Mimi speaks in a plain, colloquial style that isn’t always grammatically correct: “She always seems like she isn’t fully there and talks sorta breathy and moaning, like everything is stupid.” At other times, though, she sounds more introspective and educated, as when she tries to understand the circumstances that have led her to the psychiatric hospital: “The whole thing just feels like a slow descent, punctuated with moments of tumbling sharply and deeply into what I can only call hell.” Perhaps the uneven tone is meant to reflect her own chaotic mental state.
A tragic but ultimately uplifting tale of one woman battling personal demons.Pub Date: March 2, 2014
ISBN: 978-0615977188
Page Count: 230
Publisher: Zuriel Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 10, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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