by Kira Salak ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 5, 2008
A vivid journey too often slowed by tedious flashbacks wherein Seb urges Marika to confront her post-traumatic stress. If...
A battle-worn journalist penetrates the jungles of Papua New Guinea in search of her idol, a famous war correspondent long presumed dead.
In her preface, Salak (The Cruelest Journey: Six Hundred Miles to Timbuktu, 2004, etc.), who recounted her own PNG adventure in the memoir Four Corners (2001), explains that she sought out Peruvian shamans to help her heal after the death of her brother. Whence her first novel’s new-agey resolution, tacked on in jarring contrast to the horrific atrocities witnessed and experienced by her reporter characters. Like Marlow in Heart of Darkness, Marika crosses an intractable wilderness, ostensibly to find the novel’s Kurtz, Robert Lewis, but her true quest is the investigation of evil. Lewis was, like Marika, a maverick war correspondent who ventured alone into the world’s most chaotic war zones. After his son was killed in Africa, Lewis left a suicide note and disappeared. Marika’s guide through the malarial swamps, infested thickets and craggy mountains of a place where indigenous life has not changed in millennia is Tobo, a tribal chieftain and witch doctor. Less than willingly, Tobo becomes the “White Mary’s” taciturn, irascible and, eventually, lovable betel-nut-chewing mentor in life, love and primitive gender politics (not so different, it appears, from civilized gender politics). Marika has almost completed her biography of Lewis when a breakup with her therapist boyfriend Seb coincides with receipt of a missionary’s letter in which Lewis claims to have been spotted in the remote mountain village of Walwasi. After an arduous trek, Tobo and Marika finally encounter not only the volatile Walwasi people, whose destinies are ruled by fire demons, but also Robert Lewis, tolerated because (in an obvious irony) the Walwasi think he’s impervious to demons.
A vivid journey too often slowed by tedious flashbacks wherein Seb urges Marika to confront her post-traumatic stress. If only Marika’s internal demons were as interesting as the external ones Tobo teaches her to surmount.Pub Date: Aug. 5, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-8050-8847-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2008
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by Kira Salak
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 Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2006
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
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