Overwrought, overwritten, unpersuasive.
A great concept—why women fall for Peter Pans who never grow up—with a less than great delivery.
This time out, poet/second-novelist Fox (My Sister from the Black Lagoon, 1998) focuses on Wendy, the fifth generation of Darling women to make the flight to Neverland. The Darlings are, “like all women attracted to men who charm but don’t commit, lost girls” who find it difficult to settle down to reality. Peter, with his island, free-spirited ways, and his gift of flight, will forever haunt them as they try to find men as charming but more mature. Narrated by Wendy Darling Braverman, great granddaughter of J.M Barrie’s original Wendy, the story begins as 40-ish Wendy, living in San Francisco with husband Freeman and teenaged daughter Berry, is recovering from a breakdown. Both hurt and touched by magic, she feels that her family’s visits to Neverland—maybe illusionary—have distorted their lives. Her father, who founded an airline, was a charming man who deserted his family: aging Nana, in London, is still trying to fly, and grandmother Jane has been gone for years. Since childhood, Wendy knew about the family’s rite of passage—the appearance in adolescence of a charming boy with whom she’d fly to Neverland. Peter duly appeared, but Wendy’s visit was a disturbing mix of happy and bad memories (she may have been raped by Captain Hook) that continue to haunt her. Moving between past and the present, Wendy, a children’s storywriter, recalls her childhood and marriage as she prepares daughter Berry for Peter’s arrival. Berry, deeply troubled and conflicted, is the only Darling who can’t fly, finding it increasingly difficult to live with the Darling legend. When mother and daughter are hospitalized, the appearance of grandmother Jane, dressed as an aviatrix, helps Wendy understand herself, her family, and the hold that Peter has on them all—a gift that allows the Darling women to soar above the quotidian.
Overwrought, overwritten, unpersuasive.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-7432-1790-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
Back to a Jurassic Park sideshow for another immensely entertaining adventure, this fashioned from the loose ends of Crichton's 1990 bestseller. Six years after the lethal rampage that closed the primordial zoo offshore Costa Rica, there are reports of strange beasts in widely separated Central American venues. Intrigued by the rumors, Richard Levine, a brilliant but arrogant paleontologist, goes in search of what he hopes will prove a lost world. Aided by state-of- the-art equipment, Levine finds a likely Costa Rican outpostbut quickly comes to grief, having disregarded the warnings of mathematician Ian Malcolm (the sequel's only holdover character). Malcolm and engineer Doc Thorne organize a rescue mission whose ranks include mechanical whiz Eddie Carr and Sarah Harding, a biologist doing fieldwork with predatory mammals in East Africa. The party of four is unexpectedly augmented by two children, Kelly Curtis, a 13-year-old "brainer," and Arby Benton, a black computer genius, age 11. Once on the coastal island, the deliverance crew soon links up with an unchastened Levine and locates the hush-hush genetics lab complex used to stock the ill- fated Jurassic Park with triceratops, tyrannosaurs, velociraptors, etc. Meanwhile, a mad amoral scientist and his own group, in pursuit of extinct creatures for biotech experiments, have also landed on the mysterious island. As it turns out, the prehistoric fauna is hostile to outsiders, and so the good guys as well as their malefic counterparts spend considerable time running through the triple-canopy jungle in justifiable terror. The far-from-dumb brutes exact a gruesomely heavy toll before the infinitely resourceful white-hat interlopers make their final breakout. Pell-mell action and hairbreadth escapes, plus periodic commentary on the uses and abuses of science: the admirable Crichton keeps the pot boiling throughout.
Pub Date: Sept. 28, 1995
ISBN: 0-679-41946-2
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1995
Less bleak than the subject matter might warrant—Hannah’s default outlook is sunny—but still, a wrenching depiction of war’s...
The traumatic homecoming of a wounded warrior.
The daughter of alcoholics who left her orphaned at 17, Jolene “Jo” Zarkades found her first stable family in the military: She’s served over two decades, first in the army, later with the National Guard. A helicopter pilot stationed near Seattle, Jo copes as competently at home, raising two daughters, Betsy and Lulu, while trying to dismiss her husband Michael’s increasing emotional distance. Jo’s mettle is sorely tested when Michael informs her flatly that he no longer loves her. Four-year-old Lulu clamors for attention while preteen Betsy, mean-girl-in-training, dismisses as dweeby her former best friend, Seth, son of Jo’s confidante and fellow pilot, Tami. Amid these challenges comes the ultimate one: Jo and Tami are deployed to Iraq. Michael, with the help of his mother, has to take over the household duties, and he rapidly learns that parenting is much harder than his wife made it look. As Michael prepares to defend a PTSD-afflicted veteran charged with Murder I for killing his wife during a dissociative blackout, he begins to understand what Jolene is facing and to revisit his true feelings for her. When her helicopter is shot down under insurgent fire, Jo rescues Tami from the wreck, but a young crewman is killed. Tami remains in a coma and Jo, whose leg has been amputated, returns home to a difficult rehabilitation on several fronts. Her nightmares in which she relives the crash and other horrors she witnessed, and her pain, have turned Jo into a person her daughters now fear (which in the case of bratty Betsy may not be such a bad thing). Jo can't forgive Michael for his rash words. Worse, she is beginning to remind Michael more and more of his homicide client. Characterization can be cursory: Michael’s earlier callousness, left largely unexplained, undercuts the pathos of his later change of heart.
Less bleak than the subject matter might warrant—Hannah’s default outlook is sunny—but still, a wrenching depiction of war’s aftermath.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-312-57720-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2012
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