More script than novel.
The TV writer and producer, not to mention famous F.O.B. (Friend of Bill), debuts with the chronicle of one eventful year in a small town where a few high-school friends are still close.
Like an overfurnished room, Bloodworth-Thomason’s story is stuffed with colorful characters who (not surprisingly) all talk and behave like actors in a TV show. The small group of friends live in Paris, Arkansas, where a big superstore has been built out on the highway, so that everyone is shopping out there instead of patronizing the old Main Street businesses. This megastore and a group of prejudiced rednecks are the villains in an essentially sentimental tale that’s book-ended by a death and a wedding. When Dr. Mac dies, fortysomething Wood Mackelmore, his son and a physician, feels even more down about his own life. His marriage to Milan seems as dull as his job, and he’s feeling restless. His friends Mavis, Jeter, and Brundidge also have their issues. Mavis is single and owns a successful bakery, but she wants a baby. Jeter, who is confined to a wheelchair thanks to a football injury, writes poetry and dreams of love. And Brundidge—divorced, lonely, and determined to preserve Paris—refuses to shop at the superstore. As the friends mourn Dr. Mac, Wood’s daughter Elizabeth announces that she’s going to marry fellow college student Luke, who is the son of Duff, an old high-school flame of Wood’s. And as the year passes, Wood and Duff get together, while Milan, who has overcome a terrible past—poverty and her father’s suicide in front of her—tries to plan the wedding while ignoring Wood’s infidelity. The friends are preoccupied, too, as Mavis finds an unlikely sperm donor, has a baby, and realizes she’s gay; some louts attack Mavis, Jeter tries to save her, and Brundidge may at last have found love. As the year finally ends, there’s a wrap-up of a wedding with a difference.
More script than novel.Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2004
ISBN: 0-06-059670-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2004
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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