A sitcom with heart, and a whole lot of fun.
A wimp travels the rocky road to empowerment in the Massachusetts author’s fourth novel.
Medwed, who struck romantic-comic gold with Mail (1997) and Host Family (2000), is an insistently friendly writer who chats frequently with the reader while voicing her protagonist (and narrator) Abigail Randolph’s hopes, fears and recriminations. Abby is 33, divorced from faithless Clyde, still mourning the death of her mother in an earthquake in India (whence mom had fled with her female lover Henrietta, materfamilias of the Randolphs’ best friends and Cambridge academic-circle neighbors), involved only with the antique shop whose name—A. & C. Eclectibles—keeps reminding her of the vanished Clyde. Abby’s fortunes change when a chamberpot relinquished to her by former girlhood pal Lavinia (Henrietta’s daughter) is identified as the one-time property of poet E.B. Browning (Abby appears on TV’s Antiques Roadshow, and becomes a minor celebrity). This brings out the worst in superefficient martinet Lavinia, who sues for possession of the chamberpot, thus dredging up memories of Abby’s shattered romance with Lavinia’s dreamy brother Ned, who had sworn eternal love, then revealed all Abby’s failures and embarrassments in a crummy autobiographical novel. Abby sulks, overeats, vegetates, wades through legal niceties and intricacies, has an ill-advised fling with a straight-out-of-GQ news reporter, survives the deposition at which she faces down Lavinia and re-encounters repentant Ned, then makes another serendipitous “find,” and emerges—to her amazement—not only unscathed, but happy, for God’s sake. It’s all fairly frothy, and rather overloaded with wisecracks and breathless successions of rhetorical questions. But Medwed briskly depicts the odd world of flea markets and tag sales, and makes of Abby’s arduous liberation (not unlike the invalid Browning’s) an adventure to which Jane Austen might have raised a celebratory glass of port.
A sitcom with heart, and a whole lot of fun.Pub Date: March 14, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-083119-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 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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