A thoughtful, often affecting rumination on the way history affects ordinary people (and vice versa).
British journalist Grant’s first novel to be published in the US (after Remind Me Who I Am, Again, the memoir of her mother's dementia, p. 532) was a financial and critical success abroad, winning the Orange Prize for Fiction.
The story is narrated by Evelyn, the illegitimate daughter of an Anglo-Latvian Jew. Evelyn’s father is a vanished cipher known only from a photograph nearly 25 years old, but her mother is a very palpable presence, the mistress of a successful Jewish businessman in 1940s London and the owner of a hairdressing salon, where Evelyn sometimes works. When her mother has a nervous breakdown and dies, “Uncle” Joe, the businessman, suggests that Evelyn go to Palestine to help build a nascent Jewish homeland. Caught up in the many intrigues and cultural clashes of Palestine in the last days of the British Mandate, she finds herself bounced from a kibbutz to the burgeoning city of Tel Aviv, where she reinvents herself as a British hairdresser with an absent husband in the Army. Meanwhile, she falls into an affair with a dashing if secretive young man who may be working for the Irgun. Reduced to its basic plot elements this way, When I Lived in Modern Times sounds like the stuff of melodrama, the sort of foolish and sentimental fiction that is devoured by aging Hadassah ladies. Grant is a thinker, though, a writer who’s fascinated by the way people construct and reconstruct their identities to fit circumstances, and her novel is actually rather cerebral in its approach to its material. She’s extraordinarily good at capturing the feel and smell of ’40s Tel Aviv, vividly re-creating the chaos of a medium-sized town on the verge of becoming a city. And she is no less adept at capturing the sensations of a young woman on the verge of adulthood.
A thoughtful, often affecting rumination on the way history affects ordinary people (and vice versa).Pub Date: Jan. 29, 2001
ISBN: 0-525-94594-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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