First-novelist Canty (stories, A Stranger in This World, 1994) offers a tale of teenage love more engaging in its details than in the full-dimensioned pull of its characters. Troubled and sensitive Kenny Kolodny is 17 and unhappy at home when he falls in love with his very classy classmate Junie Williamson, winning her away from the girlfriend rumored to be her current lover. Whether Junie has been a lesbian does matter to Kenny (who's got nagging doubts about his own sexual preferences), but nowhere as much as the differences between his family and hers. Junie lives in a good part of town (in a Frank Lloyd Wright house with ``rock walls''), her father is a lawyer and her mother—though with troubles of her own—a successful pediatrician. On Kenny's side of the equation are an institutionalized mother and an abusive, deeply alcoholic father. Not surprisingly, he tells Junie little about his family while becoming more and more familiar with hers—and with Junie herself, whose bedroom allows all the privacy and privilege any pair of lovers with hyperindulgent parents carefully looking the other way could possibly wish. Where the true center of Kenny's woes really lies may not always feel completely clear—or real—to the reader, but he's already smoking a lot of dope and well on the way to dropping out of school when he finds his father is felled by a stroke; and when Junie turns up pregnant, Kenny sweeps her up and wafts her westward—though the two don't get far before life turns in a direction they hadn't expected, reasserting itself with a mundane power that will take Junie, if not to college, then toward it, and Kenny back home where for the next ten years, the suggestion is, he'll ache and pine. Canty can be stylistically engaging, but love at 18, this time around, remains an adolescent affair, however much it strains for the significant and high.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-385-47388-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1996
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
APPRECIATIONS
Less bleak than the subject matter might warrant—Hannah’s default outlook is sunny—but still, a wrenching depiction of war’s...
The traumatic homecoming of a wounded warrior.
The daughter of alcoholics who left her orphaned at 17, Jolene “Jo” Zarkades found her first stable family in the military: She’s served over two decades, first in the army, later with the National Guard. A helicopter pilot stationed near Seattle, Jo copes as competently at home, raising two daughters, Betsy and Lulu, while trying to dismiss her husband Michael’s increasing emotional distance. Jo’s mettle is sorely tested when Michael informs her flatly that he no longer loves her. Four-year-old Lulu clamors for attention while preteen Betsy, mean-girl-in-training, dismisses as dweeby her former best friend, Seth, son of Jo’s confidante and fellow pilot, Tami. Amid these challenges comes the ultimate one: Jo and Tami are deployed to Iraq. Michael, with the help of his mother, has to take over the household duties, and he rapidly learns that parenting is much harder than his wife made it look. As Michael prepares to defend a PTSD-afflicted veteran charged with Murder I for killing his wife during a dissociative blackout, he begins to understand what Jolene is facing and to revisit his true feelings for her. When her helicopter is shot down under insurgent fire, Jo rescues Tami from the wreck, but a young crewman is killed. Tami remains in a coma and Jo, whose leg has been amputated, returns home to a difficult rehabilitation on several fronts. Her nightmares in which she relives the crash and other horrors she witnessed, and her pain, have turned Jo into a person her daughters now fear (which in the case of bratty Betsy may not be such a bad thing). Jo can't forgive Michael for his rash words. Worse, she is beginning to remind Michael more and more of his homicide client. Characterization can be cursory: Michael’s earlier callousness, left largely unexplained, undercuts the pathos of his later change of heart.
Less bleak than the subject matter might warrant—Hannah’s default outlook is sunny—but still, a wrenching depiction of war’s aftermath.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-312-57720-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2012
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