The second (after Light in the Company of Women, 1994, not reviewed) in Canadian novelist Maillard's Raysburg trilogy, a series chronicling in sharp detail the clouded history and slow redemption of an unhappy child. Although the boy under consideration has been happily settled on the shores of middle age for some time before we meet him, it is obvious nevertheless that he is struggling with an unsettled past. Larry Cameron is a Boston publisher and failed geographer whose academic interest in hazard zones—that is, disaster areas— provides some clues about his own past, which was played out largely in the flood region of Raysburg, West Virginia. After a long absence, Larry is now going home for his mother's funeral, and he brings his wife Cynthia along for the ride: ``Cynthia's heard plenty about the Ohio Valley, but she's never seen it, and this unexpected chance to show it to her makes me oddly happy. Now I can't remember why I've always been so reluctant to take her to Raysburg.'' Like Larry, Cynthia never managed to complete her doctoral dissertation, but hers was in literature rather than geography—and happened to center on an obscure 19th-century novelist who lived in the small Ohio town of Massilon, only a few miles from Raysburg. As Larry arranges the funeral and looks up old friends, we glimpse the shadows of his past—his alcoholic father, his doomed younger brother, his own youthful inability to find an object for his ambitions—that drove him from Raysburg in the first place. Although—as with most trilogies—the focus is loose here, with no obvious climax or destination, the slow but continuous revelation of Larry's own past is insistent and compelling enough to draw us in, and the pattern of that same history is intricate enough to beg questions that can't be answered in one book. Graceful and fluid: A marvelous excursion into the confines of a fully realized human soul.
Pub Date: June 21, 1996
ISBN: 0-00-224397-0
Page Count: 218
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1996
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
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