The potential for an intriguing mystery is thwarted by sprawling character studies.
Among his mother’s effects, Matt has found a packet of photographs of a boy who looks like him but almost certainly can’t be him. Who is it?
Willett’s (The Christmas Angel, 2011, etc.) latest is filled with slightly eccentric relationships. Milo, the patriarch of a rather patched-together family, lives in the High House at Exmoor with his devoted sister-in-law, Lottie. Their relationship is chaste, yet they understand and support each other as the best of all married couples. Venetia, Milo’s former mistress, has recently been widowed. Estranged from her own family, she is frustrated that Milo has also distanced himself from her, perhaps out of guilt that her husband was Milo’s army buddy. Milo’s difficult ex-wife, Sara, continues to meddle in his affairs, primarily to protect the interests of their son, Nick. In Sara’s eyes, Milo’s fortune could be lost to Matt and Imogen, two children Lottie brought into the family after their father’s death and whose mother has recently died. Yet each of the children suddenly faces crisis. Matt can’t write. Nick has gotten himself into some financial troubles that have strained his marriage to Alice to the breaking point. Arguments about where to move have unmoored Imogen’s marriage to Jules, and Nick’s reappearance has reawakened dangerous feelings. Weighing their dreams against cold reality, everyone converges upon the High House, where the sale of Milo’s Summer House offers salvation. Could its sale pull Nick out of his financial difficulties? Could Imogen and Jules buy it, even though only Imogen wants it? Could it be the place to relieve Matt’s writer’s block? In the midst of all of these personal difficulties, the mystery of the cache of strange photographs gets lost. Consequently, the ominous shadow Lottie’s second sight reveals to her, the shadow standing at Matt’s shoulder, evokes more curiosity than suspense.
The potential for an intriguing mystery is thwarted by sprawling character studies.Pub Date: June 19, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-250-00369-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2012
Once again, Hilderbrand displays her gift for making us care most about her least likable characters.
Hilderbrand’s latest cautionary tale exposes the toxic—and hilarious—impact of gossip on even the most sophisticated of islands.
Eddie and Grace Pancik are known for their beautiful Nantucket home and grounds, financed with the profits from Eddie’s thriving real estate company (thriving before the crash of 2008, that is). Grace raises pedigreed hens and, with the help of hunky landscape architect Benton Coe, has achieved a lush paradise of fowl-friendly foliage. The Panciks’ teenage girls, Allegra and Hope, suffer invidious comparisons of their looks and sex appeal, although they're identical twins. The Panciks’ friends the Llewellyns (Madeline, a blocked novelist, and her airline-pilot husband, Trevor) invested $50,000, the lion’s share of Madeline’s last advance, in Eddie’s latest development. But Madeline, hard-pressed to come up with catalog copy, much less a new novel, is living in increasingly straightened circumstances, at least by Nantucket standards: she can only afford $2,000 per month on the apartment she rents in desperate hope that “a room of her own” will prime the creative pump. Construction on Eddie’s spec houses has stalled, thanks to the aforementioned crash. Grace, who has been nursing a crush on Benton for some time, gives in and a torrid affair ensues, which she ill-advisedly confides to Madeline after too many glasses of Screaming Eagle. With her agent and publisher dropping dire hints about clawing back her advance and Eddie “temporarily” unable to return the 50K, what’s a writer to do but to appropriate Grace’s adultery as fictional fodder? When Eddie is seen entering her apartment (to ask why she rented from a rival realtor), rumors spread about him and Madeline, and after the rival realtor sneaks a look at Madeline’s rough draft (which New York is hotly anticipating as “the Playboy Channel meets HGTV”), the island threatens to implode with prurient snark. No one is spared, not even Hilderbrand herself, “that other Nantucket novelist,” nor this magazine, “the notoriously cranky Kirkus.”
Once again, Hilderbrand displays her gift for making us care most about her least likable characters.Pub Date: June 16, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-316-33452-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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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