Stories that illustrate how life can look drastically different in retrospect.
Fourteen stories of revelations that come too late.
The pieces in Sloan’s (Principles of Navigation, 2015) character-driven collection often alternate between flashback and the present, showing with powerful economy of language how people arrived at where they are now. In “Bird,” Martha is recently widowed, and her children and grandchildren are staying with her for her husband Owen's funeral as she becomes distracted by memories of her late lover, Glenn. Like many stories in the book, “Bird” ends abruptly. There is an emotional climax that might have served as the beginning of Martha’s journey but comes instead on the penultimate page. Indeed, in “Bird,” the discovery comes too late to change anything for the protagonist. The same holds true of “Lost and Found.” Lauren’s memories of her difficult and vain mother interrupt the present action where she is dealing with her mother’s sudden death. When, after traveling to Thailand, Lauren learns something truly unexpected, she, like Martha, is left making sense of a relationship that has already ended with death. Elsewhere in the collection, however, this formula does not serve as clear a purpose, and the abrupt endings risk frustrating the reader. The framed narrative of “A Paris Story” and the mother-son tale of “Safe” also end where they might have only begun. Still, Sloan’s characters are rendered with sensitive and realistic detail throughout. In “Sunshine Every Day,” the final story, yet another widow’s vision of the present is clouded by a fog of regret. The drama is evoked along with the mundane: “The kettle shrieked. The clock in the dining room chimed the half-hour. She wished she had lived a different life.”
Stories that illustrate how life can look drastically different in retrospect.Pub Date: Feb. 20, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-944388-29-4
Page Count: 209
Publisher: Fomite
Review Posted Online: Nov. 27, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2017
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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