More than anyone needs to know about poker, but engaging prose and endearing characters bode well for Wener’s new career....
After a turn as a Brit pop star in the mid-’90s, Wener turned to writing fiction. Her US debut—about love, loss, and poker—is an impressive second act.
Audrey Unger is on the edge. She’s a die-hard urbanite living in London with an adoring gardener boyfriend who dreams of moving her to the countryside, a career as a math tutor and part-time bookkeeper, and fantasies of a sexual tryst with the pop star Bono (“a fantastic, filthy, sweaty, dirty shag, on a bed the size of a small Third World country”). Her true obsession, though, is her long-gone father, from whom she inherited her mathematical skills and fascination with scientific fact. When Dad gave up being a schoolteacher to turn professional poker player, with friends like “Jimmy Silk Socks,” Audrey’s mother left him for a sensible man named Frank. But then Audrey’s mother died, her father failed to show up at the funeral to rescue her, and Audrey has spiraled since then from math prodigy to shoplifter. Now 33, she’s clever, charming and “so fearful of things falling apart that I seek to destroy them before they have an opportunity to collapse beneath me.” She’s a lost soul until she meets the 400-pound, agoraphobic, obsessive-compulsive Louie Bloom, who sets her on a path of self-discovery. Louie is a busted-down American hustler who, in exchange for a window box with lavender, agrees to teach Audrey to play poker, a game he approaches with religious fervor (“For an instant you feel like you’re actually living in this world, instead of sitting on the edge of it waiting to die”). Hooked on the game, caught up in Louie’s schemes and ambitions, Audrey risks all on a trip to Vegas that could change her life and dig up her elusive father.
More than anyone needs to know about poker, but engaging prose and endearing characters bode well for Wener’s new career. (Wener’s first novel, Goodnight, Steve McQueen, will be published in early 2005 by Perennial.)Pub Date: May 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-06-058547-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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