British author Blackburn (the nonfiction Daisy Bates in the Desert, 1994) offers the same wonder, vividness, and bravura of her dazzling The Book of Color (1995), if not always also that novel’s laser-like simplicity. It must be a sign when a mermaid, in 1410, is washed ashore near a small village in England. Even though she’s gone before the man who discovers her can run to the village and back (only a lock of her hair remains), her appearance is foreboding, and “people waited with growing apprehension for what might follow.” All of this, and the pilgrimage to Jerusalem that does in fact follow, is observed by a narrator of whom we know nothing except that she has lost a lover, has come to this village, and with a tender, never judgmental eye now observes its inhabitants—including the red-haired girl; the local priest; the person who remembers The Great Pestilence; the woman who sees devils; the pregnant Sally, whose fisherman husband dies at sea after discovering the mermaid; and the shoemaker’s wife, who sees her husband through blindness, then a miraculous cure, then a gratefully painless death. So it is that, halfway through the book, for one reason or another, a small handful sets out for Jerusalem, led by the priest and by the leper who appeared on the day of the mermaid, left behind a book about the Holy Land, then later reappeared, miraculously cured. Events and people both can be hard to keep straight in this shiftingly Under Milkwood—esque reconstruction of what it may have been like to be medieval, but vividness, image, and detail only intensify, then intensify yet again, through the suffering-filled voyage to Jerusalem, the visionary torments and joys experienced there, and the sobered return (though only of the priest and the invisible teller of the tale) to faraway home. Difficult, ambitious, demanding—and exquisitely, unendingly, depthlessly beautiful both in matter and manner, to be read not just once.
Pub Date: April 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-679-43984-6
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1999
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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