by Joyce Carol Oates ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 25, 1999
That ambiguity is dramatized in a mesmerizing portrayal of small-town America in extremis that speaks volumes about the way...
The story of a handsome teenaged killer whose romantic notoriety reverberates for decades in the minds and hearts of his classmates and neighbors is the highly charged core of Oates’s generously detailed twenty-ninth novel.
In the late 1960s in the upstate New York town of Willowsville (a Buffalo suburb), 16-year-old John Reddy Heart – a charismatic, Brando-like loner – shoots and kills his mother Dahlia’s lover, a prominent local businessman; goes on trial for murder; and serves a brief prison term. Separate choruses of voices – those of the girls who adored him, and those of the boys who were his casual friends, teammates, and envious admirers – tell a patchwork tale of a self-possessed boy who came out of the West with his odd fragmented family, lived stoically and all but silently among the people he fascinated until the violent day that made him a local legend forever, and, after graduation day, disappeared without a trace. Then, halfway through the novel, Oates shifts to John Reddy’s own viewpoint, telling the story of his life both before and after Willowsville, though without ever compromising the curious opacity of his character. Finally, the “voices” of Willowsville speak again, on the occasion of his high school class’s thirtieth reunion; a celebration whose saturnalian excess is fuelled by others’ heated memories of him, as well as the (quickly accepted) rumor that he attended that reunion secretly, then stole away again without speaking to anyone. Was John Reddy his mother’s heroic defender or (as the details of his past suggest) only a disadvantaged kid caught in a spiral of accident that predetermined his fate? Is he, in fact, a distressingly ordinary soul onto whom others project their deepest dreams and fantasies?
That ambiguity is dramatized in a mesmerizing portrayal of small-town America in extremis that speaks volumes about the way our imaginations create our own reality.Pub Date: June 25, 1999
ISBN: 0-525-94451-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1999
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by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2006
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
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by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951
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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