by Katherine Center ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2009
Avoids the obvious clichés, while harkening pleasantly back to ’50s-era motherhood humor classics like Jean Kerr’s Please...
In Center’s lighthearted latest (The Bright Side of Disaster, 2007), a young mother yearns for self-realization while wrangling three boisterous preschoolers and a distracted husband.
Lanie Coates’ introduction to Cambridge, Mass., where her composer husband Peter has begun graduate studies, is a local park, where she hopes to find other mothers to befriend. The Coateses, including three boys, Alexander, Toby and Baby Sam, all under the age of five, moved from Lanie’s close-knit Houston neighborhood, leaving her supportive parents behind. At the park, the mothers recoil in shock when Toby bites another child. All, that is, but one woman, who asks Lanie when she’s due. But Lanie isn’t pregnant—she hopes. Just as she’s about to demure, Amanda, Lanie’s cheerleader high-school classmate, appears out of nowhere and offers to organize a shower. Determined to drop postpartum pounds, Lanie signs up with a local gym. Every weeknight, after the kids are in bed, Lanie works out on the treadmill, ignoring glances from a middle-aged fellow exerciser with Ted Koppel hair. Peter, busy with his piano, mostly leaves Lanie to single-handedly supervise the boys. Hoping to revive her artistic career, former painter Lanie takes up photography and finds that she’s a natural despite having to fend off her instructor, the very same Ted Koppel look-alike. When Peter, on the eve of a career-making trip, catches “Ted” kissing Lanie, a communication impasse ensues, not helped by Lanie’s tendency to mislay cell phones. Amanda, mother of preternaturally docile Gracin, tries to mentor Lanie’s makeover, but tempers her beauty and sex tips with disillusion. (Amanda’s wealthy but homely husband has decamped, bursting her Martha Stewart bubble.) In less deft hands, the horrors of the out-of-control Coates toddlers would resemble bad reality television, but Center’s breezy style invites the reader to commiserate, laughing all the way, with Lanie’s plight.
Avoids the obvious clichés, while harkening pleasantly back to ’50s-era motherhood humor classics like Jean Kerr’s Please Don’t Eat the Daisies.Pub Date: March 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6643-8
Page Count: 242
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2009
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by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2006
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
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by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951
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
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