An appealing plot isn’t enough to support thinly drawn characters.
An ex–beauty queen, along with her teenage daughter, leaves a hardscrabble life in Oregon for Los Angeles, where she hopes to become a psychic to the stars.
Debbie Allen, a former Miss America contender, and her 17-year-old daughter, Lindsey, scrape by with waitressing and the psychic-reading business they conduct in their garage. Lindsey can read tea leaves and tarot cards and is in on the con, but she would rather devote her energies to school and winning a scholarship to study astronomy in college. But Debbie, equal parts blindly optimistic and perpetually dissatisfied, has other plans: After a mysterious fire burns down their house, they drive to LA, where they can live the life Debbie has always dreamed of. Settled in at the Sepulveda Apartment Complex, with an up-close view of the 405 freeway, Lindsey is soon enrolled as a scholarship student at a Christian school, the same one Paco, her hunky neighbor, attends. At school, Lindsey is mentored by her scholarship benefactor, Joan Fields, a lonely widow whom Debbie marks as their ticket to the good life. Debbie and Lindsey ingratiate themselves with Joan, so when a storm makes their apartment soggy and destroys Joan’s Malibu estate, the three end up living together in a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel. This is only the beginning for Debbie, who plans to hold a séance for Joan’s dead husband while fleecing the widow of her considerable savings. Meanwhile, Lindsey is trying to fit in at school and plan for college while conducting an implausibly chaste romance with Paco. Though the novel has some light, sweet moments, the characters feel underdeveloped; while Lindsey and Debbie are essentially small-time grifters (though there's none of the excitement of that kind of novel here), there's little exploration of their inner lives.
An appealing plot isn’t enough to support thinly drawn characters.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-62914-751-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Sky Pony Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014
A delightfully captivating swatch of autobiography from the author of Kiss. Kiss, Switch Bitch and many others. Schoolboy Dahl wanted adventure. Classes bored him, there was work to be had in Africa, and war clouds loomed on the world's horizons. He finds himself with a trainee's job with Shell Oil of East Africa and winds up in what is now Tanzania. Then war comes in 1939 and Dahl's adventures truly begin. At the war's outbreak, Dahl volunteers for the RAF, signing on to be a fighter pilot. Wounded in the Libyan desert, he spends six months recuperating in a military hospital, then rejoins his unit in Greece, only to be driven back by the advancing Germans. On April 20, 1941, he goes head on against the Luftwaffe in the Battle of Athens. On-target bio installment with, one hopes, lots more of this engrossing life to come.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1986
ISBN: 0142413836
Page Count: 209
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1986
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The format of this taut and moving drama forcefully regulates the pacing; breathless, edge-of-the-seat courtroom scenes...
In a riveting novel from Myers (At Her Majesty’s Request, 1999, etc.), a teenager who dreams of being a filmmaker writes the story of his trial for felony murder in the form of a movie script, with journal entries after each day’s action.
Steve is accused of being an accomplice in the robbery and murder of a drug store owner. As he goes through his trial, returning each night to a prison where most nights he can hear other inmates being beaten and raped, he reviews the events leading to this point in his life. Although Steve is eventually acquitted, Myers leaves it up to readers to decide for themselves on his protagonist’s guilt or innocence.
The format of this taut and moving drama forcefully regulates the pacing; breathless, edge-of-the-seat courtroom scenes written entirely in dialogue alternate with thoughtful, introspective journal entries that offer a sense of Steve’s terror and confusion, and that deftly demonstrate Myers’s point: the road from innocence to trouble is comprised of small, almost invisible steps, each involving an experience in which a “positive moral decision” was not made. (Fiction. 12-14)Pub Date: May 31, 1999
ISBN: 0-06-028077-8
Page Count: 280
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1999
PERSPECTIVES
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