Dull, obvious, offensive, Botox- and yoga-stuffed first novel.
After losing job and husband, a high-powered businesswoman (unfortunately) finds herself: the latest in the Nanny Diaries cycle of employment novels.
Ivy Ames, in marketing for an investment house, is one of those frantically busy Wall Street women (mainlining coffee, handling the kids, hating her sexist boss) we’ve seen before. And, like most of them, she gets fired right off the bat and goes home to find hubby in flagrante with a family friend. Now unemployed, with a couple of rug-rats to feed and educate, Ivy has to figure out how to keep herself in private-school tuition and in bedding from ABC Home and Carpet. Having recently been of the ruling class, she figures out a service that parents of that class will need: consulting on how to get their children into private school. Never mind that nowhere does Quinn provide a good reason why the advice Ivy imparts to her clients couldn’t have been picked up at an Upper West Side soiree. All the reader can do is sit back and watch Ivy’s fabulous life come together in a ready-for-TV, label- and status-obsessed, technicolor fantasy. The first weakness is Ivy, barely qualifying as two-dimensional, so depressingly shallow that you might find yourself hoping for a Bonfire of the Vanities–style comeuppance at the end; she’s like a stranger wandering through her own story. And then there are the secondary characters, a clutch of stereotypes whose portrayals flirt with classism and racism at the best of times. And there’s Quinn’s writing, which provides Ivy with lines like, “To my surprise and joy, caring for the children was a joy,” in its attempt to humanize her (as a bonus, there’s a love scene that actually uses the words “loins” and “soft womanly flesh”).
Dull, obvious, offensive, Botox- and yoga-stuffed first novel.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2005
ISBN: 0-670-03381-2
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2004
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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