Some schematic plotting, but Audrey speaks so compellingly from the heart that it can be forgiven.
A sweet contemporary love story with an old-fashioned message, told by a young mother whose fears about getting old have
tragic consequences. Audrey Hastings, 32, lives in California, in the Valley. Husband Jim is a freelance set designer and builder, and while Jim works on movies and commercials, Audrey, a former champion swimmer, takes care of toddler Gina and tries to swim 66 laps—a mile—daily in their small pool. She's happy staying home with her daughter or spending time with other moms at the park, talking about their children, or strolling around the mall with Gina. She's happy, too, with Jim and, because her parents were bitterly divorced, is determined to remain married ("the only D word around here is death").But then she discovers some gray hairs and panics. Looking in the mirror, she realizes she’ll never be young again. And this insight, related in the easy, conversational, self-deprecating tone that makes Spirson’s tale so engaging and effective, becomes the worm in the rose. Now obsessed with her physical decline, Audrey relates how she suspects Jim of having an affair with his young assistant, Kim, and in revenge allows herself to be seduced by Sean, a handsome young grad student in the park selling ice cream from a truck. She unflinchingly details her guilt and the sad results of her behavior: she finds herself pregnant, and Jim learns about Sean. Audrey, however, is a survivor with a loving heart, and so is Jim. Will they both be able to move beyond her betrayal? Or manage to outlive a far worse tragedy yet to come?
Some schematic plotting, but Audrey speaks so compellingly from the heart that it can be forgiven.Pub Date: March 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-50384-6
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2000
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
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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