Well-wrought female empowerment tale with a dramatic twist ending.
In this women’s fiction/thriller novel, Myra Benning contends with a cheating husband who may also have sexually abused their teen daughter.
Myra’s professor husband, Derek, has just confirmed her suspicions that he’s been having affairs with his students. In this tense environment, just after son Peter leaves for college, Myra wakes up to her other child Susan’s screams of “Get him off!” Derek says he was comforting the 14-year-old during her nightmare, yet he also oddly remarks how the girl looked “so beautiful, laying there in the moonlight.” Myra asks Derek to leave and brings in the police and a therapist. The latter concludes that Susan is exhibiting characteristics of having been sexually abused, even if there’s no evidence of penetration. Derek then disappears, and the novel jumps 12 years. Susan, now married to a man met in group therapy, has a new baby. Myra has turned her animal illustrations into a successful cartooning career. Then Susan thinks she’s spotted Derek’s car, and Myra senses her house was broken into. Peter, who never believed his father was an abuser, tells Myra that Derek created a new life in a nearby California town. Derek, who still protests his innocence, tells Myra that he retrieved his birth certificate from her house to deal with his family’s legal matters. Informed that Derek’s stoic, also cheated-upon mother, Eleanor, is dying, Myra, now in a relationship with policeman Randy Larson, agrees to a family reunion at Derek’s family home, where Susan recovers a more complete memory of her abuse, prompting a series of tragic yet revelatory events to unfold. Kirscht (The Inheritors, 2012, etc.), a retired university lecturer, brings grace and flair to this third effort. She quickly establishes Myra, a Minnesota native who has always been a bit insecure in the rather enigmatic Derek’s world, as a sympathetic heroine who must now face up to what she may have been enabling in her marriage. Kirscht also plants just enough seeds in her smooth-flowing narrative so that its rather surprising finale doesn’t seem too far out in left field.
Well-wrought female empowerment tale with a dramatic twist ending.Pub Date: Dec. 17, 2013
ISBN: 978-1614690436
Page Count: 264
Publisher: New Libri Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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