A beguiling mix of characters in a sunny story that faithfully emphasizes the positive. Sweet soulfood only.
A noted folk artist debuts with a warmly affirming story, the first in a series, of a congregation’s attempts to save its church from being closed down.
As in the popular Mitford novels, the setting is a fictional small town where everyone knows and cares for everyone else and even the curmudgeons have hearts of gold. In Dorsetville, in New England, the Catholic Church is St. Cecilia’s, and its priests are Father James Flaherty and his elderly assistant, Father Keene. Dorsetville was once a prosperous mill town, but the congregation has shrunk, and on a bitterly cold Ash Wednesday morning, when the ancient furnace, as usual, is not working, Father James gets a call from his superior requesting a meeting to discuss the church’s fate. Father James is a good and caring priest, and he’s concerned that, if the church closes down, his elderly flock will be bereft of the comfort and community it offers, and aging Father Keene will have to go into a retirement home. Told that the church must be closed on Easter Sunday, Father James realizes that only a miracle will save it. As he worries, prayers are answered in unexpected ways: much-liked parishioner Bob, ill with cancer, undergoes a successful bone marrow transplant; Father Keene, lost in a snowstorm, is found sheltering in widow Harriet Bedford’s house; and Harriet, who has been visiting her sister, a Mother Superior, is reunited with her long-lost granddaughter. St. Cecilia’s itself still needs a miracle, which it seems to get when a hologram of the Virgin Mary, created by young computer whiz Matthew, appears in the church. Though crowds flock to see it, Easter Sunday is only hours away. But fittingly, on Easter morning Father James receives a letter that in its way offers a miraculous solution to his problems.
A beguiling mix of characters in a sunny story that faithfully emphasizes the positive. Sweet soulfood only.Pub Date: Aug. 5, 2002
ISBN: 0-670-03113-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2002
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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