Despite (or because of) her poetic flair, Addonizio’s overly romantic, dreamy take on the marginal world of her characters...
In Addonizio’s lumpen proletariat fairy tale, a young homeless woman in San Francisco survives a series of degradations, often self-inflicted, in her search for her lost husband.
By anyone’s standards, 24-year-old Rita has had a hard life. Raised in foster care after her mother’s murder by a boyfriend who also molested Rita, she began turning tricks at an early age and became addicted to heroin and alcohol. But the gamin beauty has found happiness with her husband Jimmy, a sweet man who plays the harmonica and holds a job, at least for a while. Rita and Jimmy’s fragile security shatters when they are evicted from their apartment. They move into a shabby hotel until Rita storms out after a fight over her heroin addiction. By the time she returns, Jimmy is gone. Rita finds herself on the streets. Addonizio (Little Beauties, 2005, etc.) describes with relish Rita’s wanderings among the city’s underclass: the homeless men in the park, the seedy hotels, the drug dealers. Street life’s usual danger is heightened when Rita witnesses a crime, but Gary, a private detective, takes her under his protection. Feeling pressured by his wife’s desire to have a child, Gary has begun his own downward spiral into alcoholism and thinks he’s fallen in love with Rita. All she wants is to find Jimmy. She has no idea that he’s been in jail for three months for his semi-involvement in a botched robbery. Now out, he is working hard at an Italian restaurant where he’s promoted from kitchen help to waiter, but his choice of friends threatens to get him into more trouble. As Rita and Jimmy long for each other, coincidences work against them until each grows relatively stronger and their paths converge into a not-quite-plausible happy ending.
Despite (or because of) her poetic flair, Addonizio’s overly romantic, dreamy take on the marginal world of her characters comes across as synthetic.Pub Date: July 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-7432-9772-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2007
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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