This sequel to Woiwode's first novel (What I'm Going To Do, I Think, 1969) about a honeymooning couple in northern Michigan shows Chris and Ellen back there seven years later, dealing with marital problems and with menacing strangers. Their biggest problem by far is their childless marriage (Ellen's miscarriage was reported at the end of the earlier novel). Her secret reason for being in this cabin on her grandparents' land in the dead of winter is to write a journal about that lost child, and so assuage her guilt. Chris, too, is here to write; his dissertation on the poet Roethke's journey toward the animism of Indian culture will, he hopes, make his own purposes clearer. For Chris is part Indian; though he ``wanted to pass,'' and has succeeded, he now feels his Indian heritage asserting itself. Meanwhile, there are less psychic matters demanding attention. A broken pump needs fixing; a prowler is lurking in the woods; and some Indian kids, young punks, keep pestering Chris to buy beer for them. Add to that list prejudiced bartenders in town; a teenage arsonist roaming the countryside; an aggrieved Indian who mistakenly thinks Chris shot at his wife at the town dump...well, it all makes for a busy life. What it doesn't make for is an engaging novel, for mostly Woiwode is just crying wolf (that prowler, for example, is not unmasked until the final pages), and all these nuisances throw the novel out of whack, distracting us from the serious business of Chris and Ellen trying to break free from their pasts (a cruel father in Chris's case, a sinister grandmother in Ellen's). The result? An unworkable combination of the identity-crisis novel and the city-slickers-surrounded-by- hostile-rubes genre, delivered in prose that is all thistles and thorns. A sad fumble by this major American writer.
Pub Date: June 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-689-12155-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atheneum
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1992
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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