In a delightful if remarkably unsentimental change of pace, Estleman (Stress, 1996, etc.) offers an engaging account of an innocent abroad in the Wild West. Looking back on a long and eventful life from Depression-era Hollywood, the octogenarian narrator recalls his lost youth. Obliged to flee New York City at age 16 after badly injuring a Tweed crony during the draft riots of 1863, he left behind his privileged status as the only son of a wealthy businessman. Adopting the name Billy Gashade, the well-bred tenderfoot finds refuge in a Kansas brothel where both the soiled doves and their clients fancy his piano-playing abilities. Captured in the course of a brutal attack by Quantrill's Raiders, Billy rides with the guerrillas and is befriended by Frank James. After Appomattox, the wandering minstrel (who learns to play the banjo and guitar on his educational travels) winds up in Fort Riley, Texas, where he encounters commanding officer George Armstrong Custer. By now a self-sufficient rover, the erstwhile aesthete, who's developed a taste for wine and women as well as for the songs he sings to get his supper, treks the frontier. Along his wayward way, the resolutely nonviolent Billy has brief encounters with the likes of William Bonney (a.k.a. Billy the Kid), Chief Crazy Horse, John Wesley Hardin, Wild Bill Hickok, and Oscar Wilde. Having loved and lost (to consumption) the fair young maid to whom he was paroled after running whiskey to Indians in the Oklahoma Territory, Billy returns to Manhattan nearly 20 years after bolting it, just in time to bid farewell to his dying father. Parlaying his musical talents into a low-profile career in Tin Pan Alley, he eventually heads West once again, this time with the infant film industry. A fine picaresque tale that brings to vivid, mock-heroic life many of American history's western icons. (Author tour)
Pub Date: April 16, 1997
ISBN: 0-312-85997-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1997
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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