Schmaltz Romano.
More corny Italian fare from Prior pursues the mystifying disappearance of a Roman embalmer’s husband.
Prior (Nectar, 2002, etc.) heaps together a jumble of prosaic details and characters, then prays for a novel here. There are six pages of mostly irrelevant, melodious names in the “cast.” Young Freda Lippi, née Castro, a Roman embalmer, returns home one Saturday afternoon (laden with plucked chicken, pancetta, broad beans, etc.) to find that her ventriloquist husband of three years, Alberto, has been seized and their flat ransacked. Freda never liked Alberto, whom she met on a cruise won as a prize through Mortician’s Monthly magazine, but she married him because of her mother’s prophetic dying words: “I see a ventriloquist. . . .” Actually, Freda is more aggrieved at the disappearance of her parrot Pierino. In a long flashback, she recounts the last day of her mother’s life, in 1965, when Freda was 16, and they all took off for a ride to the beach in Uncle Birillo’s new Oldsmobile Cutlass: glamorous Mamma, a famous singer; Freda’s imperious older sister, Fiamma, who was driving; and Freda. A terrible accident left Mamma embedded in a palm tree, dead; Fiamma went on to become a successful midlevel civil servant of predatory repute, and young Freda apprenticed herself to the embalmer who reconfigured her mother’s ravaged face. Back in the present, Freda flirts with the attractive detective on the case of her disappeared Alberto, who performed on Saturdays at the Berenice cabaret club, where Freda gets a brief job as a hat girl. But there’s only a halfhearted attempt to find out what happened to Alberto; in fact, the mystery is never satisfactorily solved. Prior is clearly more interested in the quirky gags of her loopy Italians—dating, cooking, collecting Mamma’s stolen teeth and so forth. Is this adorable—or inane?
Schmaltz Romano.Pub Date: July 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-06-077257-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2005
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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