A lackluster book from a writer who’s done much better.
This disappointing follow-up to Pulitzer finalist The Bright Forever (2005) centers on the apparent 1955 suicide of Dewey Finn, a gay teen who lay down on railroad tracks in his Illinois town.
Our protagonist is Sam, Dewey’s first love from years ago. The closeted, elderly Sam, still in his hometown, has opted for solitude, with only a basset hound for company. He has long been estranged, for mysterious reasons related to Dewey, from his older brother Cal. Sam’s neighbor is a boyhood acquaintance, Arthur, a lonely widower and ex-Navy man who speaks in seagoing clichés. Arthur helps Sam build an elaborate sailing-vessel doghouse, a curiosity that attracts a cub reporter, Dewey’s grandnephew, who’s begun looking into the circumstances of his relative’s death. After the doghouse story appears, Cal—now surfaced, on CNN, as hero of a hostage crisis at an Ohio grain elevator—arrives on Sam’s doorstep, on the run; he’s caught up somehow in a McVeigh-like bombing scheme. Alas, this terror plot is a red herring that grows up to be a great red whale. Herbert Zwilling, less a character than a barely embodied symbol of menace, shows up in chase of Cal, and mayhem ensues. Counterpointing the violence is a good bit of small-town hokum (household hints, cooking tips and much earnest dialogue about love). But the real disappointment comes with the conclusion to the Dewey mystery. Sam, it turns out, is a far more morally ambiguous figure than we knew, and the book’s overshadowed initial mystery turns out to be the interesting one.
A lackluster book from a writer who’s done much better.Pub Date: April 15, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-307-39124-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Shaye Areheart/Harmony
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2008
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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