by J.R. Keenan ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 23, 2014
A complicated yet convincing story of good and evil that keeps the preaching to a minimum, the suspense to the extreme.
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In Keenan’s (The Origin and Applicability of Fighter Tactics, 1986) epic tale, a retired fighter pilot and football star, now an accomplished actor, returns to the town of his youth to seek answers and perhaps right wrongs of the past. But he’d better hurry: he only has one day to live.
Bishop Healey is having the worst day of his life. His balancing of faith and malevolence is challenged when boyhood friend Jack Cochran arrives and demands absolution years after killing his abusive father, a crime for which another man was punished. After meeting with Healey, Cochran undergoes life-threatening surgery and begins to tie up loose ends, finding enough rope to hang himself as well as a few others. As the secrets of numerous misplaced patrimonies are revealed and church abuses described, it soon becomes clear why others in search of justice or revenge also want an audience with his eminence. Healey knows where the bodies are buried and who put them there. In Keenan’s novel, the Catholic Church is taken to task on many accounts, but the flogging is never a penance for the reader. Moral temptations and mitigating arguments are as complicated as anything in John Gregory Dunne’s True Confessions, and while this book stretches for the scope of Michener with flashbacks and back story, Keenan masterfully keeps the focus on men and women under stress. Readers see Cochran’s rough and tumble past and his career in Vietnam and how those events influenced him; unfortunately, we seeing nothing of his career as an award-winning actor, a garden that could have provided a rich harvest of iniquity. The narrative relies almost entirely on dialogue, which speeds exposition but does little to allow the world to be seen through the eyes of its characters.
A complicated yet convincing story of good and evil that keeps the preaching to a minimum, the suspense to the extreme.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-5025-8664-3
Page Count: 410
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Aug. 13, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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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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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