Modern-day Hollywood cutthroats merge with Boston Brahmins past and present in this engaging, richly textured, and virtually seamless family saga. Production designer and self-styled Los Angeles insider Zoe Hillyard is on the brink of her first really big movie, a daring period piece set in Boston in the 1890s and directed by the notoriously difficult Julian Frye. Zoe has also fallen in love, although Roger, an art dealer who's one hundred percent sure of his feelings for her, hasn't yet received the answer he's been waiting for: Zoe's a commitment-phobe with unresolved family issues galore. In fact, she hasn't spoken to her brother Arthur—who still lives back in Zoe's hometown of Boston—in over ten years; when her great-aunt Annabelle, who has been living with Arthur, suffers a fatal stroke, Zoe's cousin Claudia calls her and brings her back home for the first time in more than a decade. The reunion with Arthur proves more complicated than Zoe had foreseen, and she extends her visit under the pretense of helping him with funeral arrangements but with the actual goal of discovering the family she never knew firsthand, especially Augusta, her ``Grandmäre'' and the famous Hillyard matriarch, who—although Zoe doesn't know it until almost too late—has left her two legacies that money could just never buy. By the time Arthur comes clean with what's been keeping him out nights, Claudia is satisfied with her efforts to reunite her cousins, and Zoe reveals her true feelings to Roger, The Gilded Affair—the film that was to be Zoe's big break—is in jeopardy . . . but rest assured that a dramatic resolution occurs, in fine Hollywood style. Interspersed entries from Augusta Hillyard's diaries serve as surprisingly effective counterpoint to the trials and tribulations of her troubled but eminently strong-willed great-grandchildren. In all, a promising debut.
Pub Date: April 10, 1996
ISBN: 0-312-13949-7
Page Count: 432
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1996
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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