A poignant, elegant story about loss and the enduring power of love.
In Grant’s (Pranked, 2015, etc.) novel, a boy makes a wonderful new friend who’s terminally ill.
The unnamed narrator of this book looks back 70 years on one special day in his childhood, “Perhaps my best day.” On a holiday visit to the seashore, the young, lonely narrator feels he can’t connect with the other vacationers’ loud, confident kids, and his parents are busy with work and a new baby. But then he meets Ilio, a boy who’s two or three years older than he is. He has a thoughtful, fey quality that marks him as different from most children; it turns out that he’s dying of an incurable illness, and his last wish is “to stand at the edge of the world,” on the seashore. The boys become instant friends and spend a perfect day building a kite. This requires many steps, but Ilio is resourceful, and they’re proud of their accomplishment. As they joyfully fly the finished kite, the narrator wonders “Was the kite me? And what about Ilio?...Were he and I connected forever? And if that were true, wasn’t everyone connected to everyone else, over and over, forever and always?” The narrator, struggling with the mystery of suffering, is again reminded of connectedness when Ilio, close to death, says that “Everyone suffers. Just not at the same time.” Grant makes her story seem timeless, like a parable, and this feeling is underscored by the narrator’s namelessness. The book asks some big questions about life, death, and memory and sticks with the child’s point of view even when investigating complicated subjects. The multilayered characterization is handled well; for example, the narrator begins the book feeling oppressed by critical yet distant adults, who seem like a different species to him, but by the end, he feels real empathy for Ilio’s father. Another kind of character development occurs when the narrator tries to distract Ilio by telling a tale, showing the beginnings of his writerly talent as he discovers the challenges of composition (“How was it that anyone ever made up a good story?”) and finds ways to resolve them.
A poignant, elegant story about loss and the enduring power of love.Pub Date: April 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-73308-060-6
Page Count: 155
Publisher: Yearning Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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