An odd hybrid of fiction and well-known facts, mixing several points of view, none too successfully. And frequent quotes...
Pop pundit Roiphe (The Morning After, 1993, etc.) switches genres for a fictional account of the Reverend Charles Dodgson's obsession with Alice Liddell—and it's not exactly Wonderland.
The shy Oxford don gets along much better with children, especially girls, than with adults. He's unmarried, unable to come to terms with adult sexuality, still disgusted by his memories of his ever-pregnant mother’s perpetually swollen belly, the visible evidence of his father's lust. Socially inept and cursed with an incurable stutter, Dodgson isn’t much of a teacher, but the languorous young aristocrats he instructs in the finer points of logic and mathematics don't really care. All in all, he seems harmless enough, and the socially ambitious wife of the new dean sees nothing wrong with his friendship with her three young daughters. But she's puzzled: Why is the unmarried, somewhat effeminate young man so drawn to Alice, the least conventionally pretty of her offspring? The answer is hinted at in letters and extracts from Dodgson's diaries: his attraction is powerfully sexual, worshipfully loving: Alice is his heart's desire. He represses such thoughts as best he can but is plagued by nightmares in which much of the surreal imagery of Alice in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking-Glass first appears. He begins to photograph Alice in typically Victorian poses as a beggar girl, a garden nymph, and so forth, and falls more deeply in love with her each passing day. The pivotal moment: Dodgson at last dares to photograph Alice naked and is nearly crazed with erotic excitement as he watches her prance around, glorying in the power of her nudity. He later presents Alice with the pictures in secret, but Mrs. Liddell finds them. From then on, Dodgson is forever banned from all contact with the Liddell family.
An odd hybrid of fiction and well-known facts, mixing several points of view, none too successfully. And frequent quotes from Dodgson’s tenderly passionate diary entries only underscore the deficiencies in Roiphe’s own style, which is noticeably contemporary in tone—and unconvincing.Pub Date: Sept. 11, 2001
ISBN: 0-385-33527-X
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2001
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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