A basic boy-meets-girl debut that’s unfortunately tarted up with outlandish characters who sound like dropouts from an indie...
Picaresque debut about the crooked path of a true love between two unlikely people in an unlikely place.
Ruby Falls is an arty LA glam-girl, an animator who works on a children’s cartoon series and lives in the guesthouse of an aging porn queen named Jeannie, whose Laurel Canyon homestead is a kind of low-rent San Simeon—full of dogs, perverts, and artists of various stripes. Ray Rose is a divorced Florida construction worker who inherited a rather grand house from a total stranger who picked his name out of a telephone book. Where will Ray and Ruby’s paths cross? In Alaska, actually, where they both go to get away from some bad stuff. What kind? We’re told at the start that Ray killed a man (though we don’t get the details right away) and that his most recent wife left him a few months ago. As for Ruby, she came home one night to find that an intruder had shot all of Jeannie’s dogs, then raped and killed the dog-walker. Plus, she has lately given up on her Iranian boyfriend. So there’s plenty to forget on both sides. In Alaska, Ruby climbs mountains and Ray moves into a small campsite, where he finds work as a handyman and carpenter. The two meet in a bar and fall in love, but in between their bouts of kayaking and lovemaking, both find themselves still troubled by the darker shadows of their past lives. Eventually, they work the shadows, only to find that the present holds troubles and griefs of its own.
A basic boy-meets-girl debut that’s unfortunately tarted up with outlandish characters who sound like dropouts from an indie sitcom and that suffers from workshop prose (“Early mornings are all about the ax, chainsaw, stump grinder, and tractor”) as thick as treacle.Pub Date: March 18, 2004
ISBN: 1-58234-398-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2004
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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