A debut collection of eight linked stories more or less supports the notion that ``there are no happy marriages...only unexamined ones.'' And these tales of incest, suicide, cancer, alcoholism, divorce, and madness are as cheerful as a Bergman movie, with much of the same Protestant angst. Svendsen's bleak terrain is Vancouver, where her working-class family leads its life of gloomy desperation. The narrator, Adele Nordstrom, wanders through thirtysomething years of domestic memories, profiling her screwy half-siblings and step-relatives as well as her thrice-married mother, June, a lounge pianist who's determined never to be without a man. Along the way, Adele reveals herself to be smart and sharp-tongued and destined to leave the dull Northwest. After years of admiring her manly half-brother Ray, she realizes, in ``Who He Slept By,'' that he ``might be an asshole''—a shiftless drunk and womanizer. ``Flight'' concerns half-sister Joyce, a young married woman abandoned by her husband, who then sinks into depression and madness. A family holiday, ``Boxing Day,'' proves an unsurprising disaster, as tension mounts between Adele's mother and her younger husband, Robert. ``Heartbeat'' and the title story suggest the reasons for Adele's own failure at marriage—her insane jealousy, her passivity. By the time of ``Belgium,'' she's a divorced mother of two living in Brooklyn, who comes West when her other half-sister Irene, long considered the family's ``lone success'' in marital affairs, develops cancer in her early 40s. The truth of her domestic situation turns out to be the greatest horror of all. Despite the throbbing downbeat, Svendsen's slim volume is distinguished by sharp, economical prose and a voice we want to hear more from.
Pub Date: July 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-10088-8
Page Count: 180
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1992
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
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