A morbidly obese novella.
Three high-school chums torment each other with a trip to Manhattan before coming clean about a long-festering secret.
Rhonda, Holly and Gina Kay were the three teen musketeers of the small Texas town of Lamberton. Rhonda, the brain of the group, went on to college and a successful legal career after being forcibly separated from her obsession, high-school boyfriend Terry Robertson. Holly had dreams of fashion fame but has settled for a bustling wedding-gown business in Waco. Gina Kay grew up dirt poor in a manufactured home with loving parents. (Her mother, grossly overweight and in need of constant care, was unable to leave her house.) With Holly and Rhonda’s support, Gina Kay won the Miss American Teenager beauty pageant title—and scholarship. In college, Rhonda started seeing Terry again surreptitiously, even after he tried to kill her by ramming his convertible into a tree. Although he’s heir to a ranching fortune, his dark past and forbidding father have nourished a mean and self-destructive streak. Rhonda and Gina Kay have been estranged since Gina Kay dropped out of college suddenly and eloped with Terry. Cut to the present, when the last of Terry’s many vehicular suicide attempts has succeeded, and the trio gathers at Gina Kay’s ranch after his funeral. There, a pageant event the pretext, the three, in their 40s now, decide to take a Manhattan reunion-and-reconciliation trip. The women befriend their New York City driver, Russian immigrant G.W., ultimately planning a wedding for his daughter in Brighton Beach. Suspense is of the flashback-fueled, wait-and-hurry-up variety, and narrative padding postpones Rhonda’s disappointing assignation with a would-be lover. Worse, Gina Kay refuses to explicate the Terry situation until trip’s end. Along the way, there are large chunks of Manhattan logistics and less-than-convincing apologias for good but dull husbands before getting to the genuinely intriguing questions: What really happened between Gina Kay and Terry, and can Rhonda ever get it out of her system?
A morbidly obese novella.Pub Date: May 5, 2005
ISBN: 0-684-87388-5
Page Count: 328
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2005
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
BOOK REVIEW
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