Love and life, death and the law—all mix and match in this freewheeling southern comedy from Edelson (Bad Housekeeping, 1995, etc.), as a family warped by tragedy careens toward a catastrophe in the unlikely form of a Thanksgiving dinner. Years earlier, Angie and Joe DiPietro suffered a grievous loss when their five-year-old son died of Reye’s syndrome. Now Angie is a crisis-line- and hospice-volunteer and a supplier of marijuana to cancer patients, as well as the mother of teenaged Tess and young Nick, who’s slightly older than her other boy was when he died. Angie is also a woman of affairs—her latest Romeo is Mason, her pot grower. Between Angie and Joe is a wall of grief grown thick with the years. Joe has channeled his misery into his legal work, but knowledge of Angie’s latest infidelity drives him to explore that option too, with a curvy Puerto Rican psychologist whose professional services he’s used in court. Meanwhile, Tess, in the full flower of adolescent rebellion, runs away—though not far. From her new vantage point, she witnesses both her parents stepping out, and she lashes out by ratting on her own wanna be boyfriend, who’s nabbed carrying enough LSD to put him away for a while. Then Mutt, the family dog, dies. Somehow out of this maelstrom emerges a family Thanksgiving complete with all the trimmings: both lovers, Angie’s paranoid mother, Tess and her now-bailed-out boyfriend, and even Mutt, sealed in a cooler while awaiting burial in the backyard. For a moment it looks as if there’s magic in the air. Then the police arrive. . . . Riotously fresh and funny scenes, written with liberal doses of irony and reality. The finale, though, steps too far over the credibility line, ringing a sour note in what is otherwise a wonderful chorus of wacky southern voices.
Pub Date: May 1, 1999
ISBN: 1-58195-003-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1999
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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