Gentle, music-infused romantic drama taking place in an out-of-the-way spot on the Eastern Seaboard.
A new life of friends and young love begins for Robin George when he forsakes his Maryland family’s retail empire to work as a bridge tender.
First-time author Davies’ lyrical novel reads like a true labor of love, with an endearing cast and a fondly rendered locale. The time period is the early 1980s in the Georgetown/Chestertown vicinity in Kent County, Maryland. Traversed by many rivers entering the Chesapeake Bay, the area sustains a strong boating and college-town culture. This is where young Robinson George, heir to his family’s chain of big-box drugstores, accepts an obscure state job as apprentice bridge tender—a contemplative gig operating (and practically dwelling inside) an old drawbridge spanning a waterway used by pleasure boaters. Robin joins the “brotherhood of the bridge,” which includes the widowed, ailing old tender Sean Flaherty; the big, laconic Odis; Father Hunter, a liberal-minded Catholic priest; and Sarah, a lesbian newspaper reporter covering the region. Robin’s new life coincides with a dizzying affair with the voluptuous Melinda McClellan, a more experienced older woman starting a promising but slightly anxious career as a vocalist on the regional coffeehouse circuit. The sensuous Melinda moves in with Robin, smitten by his good-hearted infatuation, but she does not seem to consider the arrangement monogamous or lasting. Indeed, a redevelopment scheme aims to demolish the old, possibly failing mechanical bridge in favor of an impersonal, high-rise motorway. The idyll can’t last, a fact confronted by the ensemble with wise acceptance—one might even say too much wise acceptance, as even Robin’s bourgeois parents don’t dispute his sudden veering off the life/business plan. Elements of R&B music and Roman Catholicism (a pretty progressive brand, considering all this technically happens during the Reagan years) flavor the thoughtful, elegiac narrative.
Gentle, music-infused romantic drama taking place in an out-of-the-way spot on the Eastern Seaboard.Pub Date: June 3, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-692-70618-3
Page Count: 338
Publisher: Herman Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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