More persuasive as polemic than as fiction.
The life of a burnt-out, boozy, under-performing journalist in Africa is turned around via her involvement with an AIDS campaigner.
In Santoro’s erratic debut, the central character, Anna, is stuck in a self-destructive tailspin, although she can still manage bursts of outrage at the tribulations of the African continent. Transferred from Rome to Nairobi by her Boston-based editor, Anna drinks hard and plays off her angry boyfriend Michael against a smooth lover named Nick, under the disapproving eye of her larger-than-life African housekeeper Mercy. A mood of threat and misery hangs over the pages as Anna goes on assignments which offer the reader vignettes of bribery, disease, poverty, violence and plenty of suffering. After Michael is killed in Sierra Leone, Mercy leaves and Anna goes to New York for the funeral, then on to an assignment in Belgrade, to interview a Serbian war criminal. On her return to Nairobi, she resumes the affair with Nick but also discovers that Mercy has AIDS. Now Anna’s rage can be applied more effectively, by paying and pressuring for Mercy’s treatment which comes—via anti-retroviral drugs—at the eleventh hour. Mercy’s return to health transforms her into an impassioned campaigner for cheaper drugs. Anna, reformed, is full of admiration. The campaign peaks with a one-million-woman march, which forces the health minister to act. But his decision to ban imported drugs and start manufacturing cheap copies means there will be a gap in availability, which condemns Mercy to death. She accepts this and so must Anna, who will take care of her children.
More persuasive as polemic than as fiction.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-59051-271-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 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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