A white American observes three graduate students from China cope with the US—especially TV—while they're also being filmed for a documentary: Whisnant's first novel, portions of which appeared in Esquire, is a breezy, likable tragicomedy that lightly bats about issues in contemporary culture. After a stint as a starving artist in New York, Dexter Mitchell finds himself stuck in Cleveland. Still, the city does have advantages—a lively multicultural neighborhood, the amusement afforded by the brilliant, inventive, but often hapless Chinese students who are being filmed, and the promise—for those who can get it—of love with the beautiful but difficult Suzanne. It's Dexter who, with many a wry turn of phrase, tells the students' story, intercut with excerpts from the documentary film script. During the days of hostages in Iran, Reagan's election, and John Lennon's assassination, the students learn the language of brand names and football; they parody American ideas of Chinese culture after seeing old Charlie Chan movies. Wa remains faithful to his communist vision and avoids corrupting influences; pragmatic Tzu is not overwhelmed by either comfort or dogma; while the youngest student, Chen, finds tragedy as he plunges into the materialism and pleasures of American life. His naive identification with Malcolm X (both are nonwhite, both memorize words from the dictionary) cannot protect him from black muggers; his affair with Suzanne leads to his own violent American death. Gentle fun-poking at cultural fashions and cross-cultural confusion, plus some surfacey but enthusiastic intellectual reference-dropping: a quick, charming read that skirts the pain and rarely transcends its clever premise.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-945575-83-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
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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