From Dutch writer Mîring, an ambitious search-for-the-meaning- of-life novel that offers lovely moments but suffers from flat- footedness. The three van Dijk children—twins Sam and Lisa, born in 1957, the year of Sputnik, and their slightly older brother Raph—are transformed into orphans one night in 1969 when their parents ``drove into a tree on their way home.'' The children are placed separately into a series of foster homes until they come of age—at which time they seek one another out once more and the novel begins. The story is told mainly by Sam, who not only doesn't know quite what to do with his life but feels that his memory has gone empty and dead—hence his ``great longing,'' however doomed, to recapture what's been lost of childhood, family, and the past. Yearlong wanderings with Raph don't help much, nor do extended talks with sister Lisa, whose own memory is deep and full but who isn't terribly stable, her marriage less so. No rule says much has to happen in a novel, and the trouble here isn't that little does- -outwardly, at least—but only that what does happen is so often inadvertently banal. Mîring's descriptions of a ruined, post- industrialist European landscape and cityscape are often powerful, as are his efforts to sweep up lyrical bouquets of half-lost memories. But things that could possibly be of substance deteriorate, again and again, to adolescent posturing in lines like ``I began to understand that the journey...was an attempt to appease the hunger of youth''; or `` `I don't know,' she said. `I don't know if you understand anything about people and human relationships' ''; or ``I know you're in there, I said to the void inside my head.'' Earnest themes of modern loss, but, on balance, more often jejune than moving.
Pub Date: May 24, 1995
ISBN: 0-06-017243-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1995
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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