Throughout the military dictatorship in Argentina from the late 1960s through 1982, Heker, an award-winning short-story writer, remained in the country and continued editing the literary magazine El Ornitorrinco (the Platypus) instead of going into exile. The six stories in her latest collection, selected from three previous, untranslated collections, concern adolescents or young people of artistic or intellectual inclinations, mostly female, who question the events that affect their daily lives and ponder how they themselves fit into the chaotic world around them. Heker is wise and creates recognizable, intelligent characters caught in situations they cannot control. In the magically realistic first story (``Georgina Requeni or The Chosen One''), a girl imagines that her beauty and artistic talent will enable her to ``soar'' above everyone else but discovers she cannot avoid falling, or aging. In another darkly humorous tale (``Family Life''), a male computer programmer discovers that his precise, logical universe has been rearranged—a strange family has displaced his own and nobody has ever heard of him at work. In the title story, a maid's daughter attends the party of the daughter of her mother's employer believing she is a ``little countess'' only to learn that she is a lady's maid-in-training and that her future has been decided for her. Sometimes Heker's tales get too abstract (``Early Beginnings or Ars Poetica''), and some of the characters sound more like overlapping young voices inside the writer's head than like people in their own right (``Bishop Berkeley or Mariana of the Universe''). Unconventional, lyrical prose, marred by few false notes and filled with a sense of protest, by a writer concerned with the role of artists in society.
Pub Date: July 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-88910-466-2
Page Count: 136
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1994
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
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