An uneven collection that would have benefited from more careful culling.
A batch of lackluster coming-of-age stories mingle with sharply observed tales of contemporary angst in Kulpa’s first collection.
The title story, the book’s strongest, deals with two brothers who drink too much. It’s Christmas Eve, and Scotty, who has been sober for ten months, is home with his wife Stephanie and their two daughters. His brother Bill, who thrives on drama, calls and insists that Scotty meet him at a pizza place. Bill has discovered his ex-wife in bed with a much younger man and he has retaliated by taking their 18-month-old son. Scotty drives with him to the house of a friend who can take care of the baby, then to their hometown. There the brothers take a trip down memory lane and end up in a bar where customers knew their father, who jumped out of a window on Christmas Eve ten years before. Another intriguing story, “Maintaining,” offers a look at the dramas inside a drug and alcohol treatment clinic, told from the perspective of a receptionist. A half-dozen stories tread more familiar ground—losing love, finding love—without any particular distinction. “Have You Seen Her” is an overly lengthy search for a lost love whose photo the protagonist thinks he has spotted in a Lower East Side deli; “Someone You Don’t Remember” is a too-brief sketch about a former lover; “Elaine, I Love You,” finds a woman remembering her crush on a Polish sailor who docked in Newport when she was 13. “Cristina in Another Country” is a more daring and more effective tale of a lost love, told in fragments by a college student whose road trip is detoured to Mexico. The last story, “The Salvation Café,” is a mere paragraph long, and not a very interesting paragraph at that.
An uneven collection that would have benefited from more careful culling.Pub Date: Aug. 20, 2005
ISBN: 0-922811-62-8
Page Count: 232
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2005
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
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