by Keith Dixon ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 2004
Strong stuff if your taste in family values runs to permafrost.
The death of their wife and mother leaves a father and son locked in motionless combat: a grim debut from New York Times editor Dixon.
Once upon a time Warren Bascomb was a respected orthopedist, well-liked by his hospital colleagues and successful by the standards of the outer reaches of New York City. But when his addiction to the painkiller Dilaudid was discovered, he was fired and his medical license suspended, with the coup de grâce supplied by his old medical school friend Ned Strickland, now the hospital’s chief of staff. Ever since, Warren’s soldiered on by renting out the services of his son Ben to a local supplier named Vic, a petty lord who provides in return the fixes he needs. But now the fatal overdose of Warren’s wife, leaving both husband and son sunk in self-justifying recriminations, has unraveled the rickety support network the two men have provided each other. And things soon get worse. Ben owes Vic an impossible sum he refuses to pay and remains deaf to Warren’s pleading; Vic announces in word and deed that he won’t be stalled forever; and the Bascombs circle each other all the while like wolves spoiling for a fight. Despite the obligatory set pieces—scenes of fighting and torture and drug-induced euphoria, capped by a pair of horrific fires—the real action here takes place deep inside the frozen characters, haunted alike by a past they cannot get over and show no sign of having shared. Dixon stokes the fires within them with precise descriptions—Warren sees Ned’s nubile wife Cindi as “every bit the lengthy showgirl of Warren’s grimy teenage fantasies”—and lacerating flickers of conflict like Warren’s brief, doomed encounter with Victor’s main twist Trina, née Abigail, until the exhausting tale doesn’t so much wind up as run down.
Strong stuff if your taste in family values runs to permafrost.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-312-31740-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2003
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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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SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
by Christina Lauren ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 10, 2018
With frank language and patient plotting, this gangly teen crush grows into a confident adult love affair.
Eleven years ago, he broke her heart. But he doesn’t know why she never forgave him.
Toggling between past and present, two love stories unfold simultaneously. In the first, Macy Sorensen meets and falls in love with the boy next door, Elliot Petropoulos, in the closet of her dad’s vacation home, where they hide out to discuss their favorite books. In the second, Macy is working as a doctor and engaged to a single father, and she hasn’t spoken to Elliot since their breakup. But a chance encounter forces her to confront the truth: what happened to make Macy stop speaking to Elliot? Ultimately, they’re separated not by time or physical remoteness but by emotional distance—Elliot and Macy always kept their relationship casual because they went to different schools. And as a teen, Macy has more to worry about than which girl Elliot is taking to the prom. After losing her mother at a young age, Macy is navigating her teenage years without a female role model, relying on the time-stamped notes her mother left in her father’s care for guidance. In the present day, Macy’s father is dead as well. She throws herself into her work and rarely comes up for air, not even to plan her upcoming wedding. Since Macy is still living with her fiance while grappling with her feelings for Elliot, the flashbacks offer steamy moments, tender revelations, and sweetly awkward confessions while Macy makes peace with her past and decides her future.
With frank language and patient plotting, this gangly teen crush grows into a confident adult love affair.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-2801-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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