A bewildering array of detail offers little to satisfy stylistically.
Tucker’s far-fetched, heavily calibrated third novel, after Shout Down the Moon (2004), imagines the splintering effects of trauma on characters destined to meet between Hollywood, N.M. and St. Louis.
First, there is Stephen Spaulding, who lost his wife and young daughter in a car accident near their home in St. Louis. A family doctor at 30, Stephen gives up his practice after the accident to drive a cab and retell the story of the collision to whoever will listen. Next, there is the strangely anachronistic young woman Dorothea, who hires Stephen as a driver to help find her missing brother, Jimmy, hospitalized and homeless after fleeing the isolated New Mexico home of their reclusive father. Dressed, without irony, as if going to a ’50s sock hop, poor Dorothea has never even left her family home, let alone read a newspaper or watched TV. Finally, there is Lucy Dobbins, a singer living in Malibu, whose incredible story involves marriage 27 years before to famous Hollywood director Charles Keenan and his eventual disappearance and abduction of their two young children. The traumatic turning point of Lucy’s fairytale marriage to the much older, controlling Charles was a vicious attack by intruders at their posh mansion that left Lucy near death and her husband thereafter terrified of losing her and the children. All of these curious elements fit together in a creaking, painstakingly constructed plot: Dorothea and Jimmy emerge as the two long-lost children, removed by their paranoid father to isolation in New Mexico in order to shield them from bodily harm—in fact, leaving them with emotional scars too deep to heal. In the course of Stephen’s helping Dorothea care for her brother, a touching, unlikely romance sparks between the two needy trauma victims; discovery of the real identities of her parents is, predictably, imminent. Unfortunately, these toneless characters cannot contend with the busy plot.
A bewildering array of detail offers little to satisfy stylistically.Pub Date: April 11, 2006
ISBN: 0-7434-9277-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2006
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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