A meandering and didactic family saga by Chickasaw poet, novelist, and essayist Hogan (Dwellings, p. 835; Mean Spirit, 1990), a tale that attemptsÖ la Little Big Manto rewrite the history of the American West from a Native American perspective. At 17, Angela Jensen decides that it's time to untangle her family, a process she begins by going hometo a remote village in western Canada called Adam's Rib, a place she no longer even recognizes. Angela looks up Agnes Iron, her great-grandmother, whom she's never met, and is soon introduced to Bush, who looked after Angela's deranged mother, Hannah, and raised Angela herself after Hannah's early death. At first, it is information about her motherstories, accounts, explanationsthat most interests Angela, but eventually she understands that the history of her family is woven tightly into the history of her family's tribe and the bloody strife that has colored their lives ever since the white men came among them: ``For us, hell was cleared forests and killed animals. But for them, hell was this world in all its plenitude.'' The troubles have been carried down to the present day, except that now the threat is comprised not of missionaries and European settlers but of government authorities who want to develop the land out of existence through the construction of a mammoth hydroelectric power plant. As her consciousness is raised, Angela begins to recognize her real identity but desires, and the anger that she labors under throughoutand that finds expression mainly in the crudest caricatures of Western culture and North American history imaginableis relieved by the happy fulfillment of her romantic (rather than political) life: a fairy-tale marriage that seems in this terrain to be even more out-of-place than the dam would have been. Tediously obvious and overwritten; Hogan's characters are so excruciatingly limited to the representation of their cultures that they become little more than allegories, reducing the tale to agitprop.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-684-81227-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1995
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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