Already optioned for film. The camera work on Africa, applied to a lush subject, should be better than Stevens’s competent...
Commercial-director Stevens wades into fiction with the story of an American businessman lost in the heart of Africa’s darkness.
Lewis is an international sales rep for Coca-Cola when the plane he’s on is forced to make an emergency landing at an abandoned wartime airstrip in the middle of the jungle: while the party lands well enough, it seems that the rebel militia who discover them may kill them all anyway. In fear, Lewis runs off into the forest (he should have just stayed on the plane, since everyone was released), where he learns firsthand of the wilderness by witnessing the brutality of a chimp murder, then by his own killing of a species of dwarf antelope. He contracts malaria and is found by a young African boy named Kofi (wearing a Pepsi shirt), who provides medicine and becomes Lewis’s sidekick as Lewis has phantom sex with a ndoki, a witch, and dines on monkey. Meanwhile, Lewis’s estranged wife, Helen, packs up their blind-from-birth son and heads to Africa to find the father of her child. Lewis eventually makes his way to civilization but leaves Kofi behind once he gets there—then soon braves the rifles of border guards to go back to find the boy who saved him, with the result that they’re both again in the jungle, running with pygmies and participating in gun battles. Helen, meanwhile, has given up searching for her husband and gone home, only to find this decision unbearable, so now she too must go to Africa with the blind boy all over again. Will she find her husband, and will their love be renewed? Do the blind boy’s visions suggest magic like the ndoki’s? Will Lewis survive this thinly veiled tour of modern Africa?
Already optioned for film. The camera work on Africa, applied to a lush subject, should be better than Stevens’s competent but dry prose.Pub Date: May 3, 2002
ISBN: 1-56512-336-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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