A debut to be enjoyed by idealists everywhere, and one bound to get Austin locals gossiping.
Acid-sweet tale of life, love and politics in slackerville.
Texas Monthly writer Olsson’s wry first novel is set in a lightly fictionalized Austin, Texas, a town disoriented by the tech boom. Centered on the tight-knit political scene (it reads like a post-script to Billy Brammer’s The Gay Place), Olsson’s characters cross paths as they struggle fitfully toward action through a haze of heat, alcohol and compromised ideals. Nick Lasseter, a reporter for the no-longer-independent Weekly, is sunk in a torpor exacerbated by the paper’s new “serve the consumer” attitude and his ex-girlfriend’s engagement. His uncle, Bones Lasseter, is an alcoholic wreck of a wily lobbyist who misses the ’70s, when cheap rent, drugs and ideals were easily attainable. Distracted by her affair with the dimwitted but handsome gubernatorial candidate, Republican freshman legislator Beverly Flintic unwittingly sponsors a bill written by a national land developer and innocently breaks with the party line. An ambitious black woman, Andrea Carter is just putting in her time among the white liberals at the daily paper, but finds herself drawn to Nick’s world of drinking, music and eccentricity when they go on a few dates. (Latinos, by the way, are oddly absent from Waterloo.) Andrea is haunted by her father’s Waterloo legacy as a desegregationist and employee of congressman William Sabert, whose death opens the novel. Mourned as one of the last great liberals, Sabert is really a moderate who drifted into greatness. Indeed, the importance and danger of drift, mess, moderation and nostalgia is Olsson’s true subject—and a strength and weakness of the novel. Olsson’s narrative lines touch, but do not cohere. Important things happen, but the action seems deliberately muted, belated, offstage. Ultimately, however, Olsson’s dry irony, nuanced observations and enjoyably moody atmosphere build into a sophisticated portrait of her hometown.
A debut to be enjoyed by idealists everywhere, and one bound to get Austin locals gossiping.Pub Date: Oct. 12, 2005
ISBN: 0-374-28626-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
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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