Conceptually intriguing but narratively uncompelling. Wuthering Heights it’s not.
Australian playwright McConnochie nods to the Brontës while investigating her country's convict past—in a melodramatic and muddled debut that chronicles the dangers threatening three literary daughters and their martinet father on an island penal colony.
Set in the late 1840s, the story proceeds via brief first-person accounts by Charlotte, Emily, Anne, and their father. The family once lived on a farm in the outback called Haworth, but when his only son, 13-year-old Branwell, died from thirst while exploring the bush, the grieving Captain Wolf became governor of a prison on Coldwater Island. The captain, whose qualifications for the job seem more related to plot exigencies than specific abilities, dreams of reforming prisoners and often selects a likely candidate for special treatment. But he also has a dark side, as his adoring daughters eventually learn. The tale begins just after Captain Wolf has been badly wounded in a prison uprising. Charlotte, worried about their future if he dies, suggests to her sisters that they write novels. Anne and Emily share their ideas, but Charlotte, who at 31 fears she will never marry, works on her own. Their father recovers and, to Charlotte’s alarm, takes as his valet a recently arrived Irish revolutionary prisoner, the handsome but menacing Finn O’ Connell. Naturally, the job requires Finn to spend time in the house, and sensitive, romantic Emily falls in love with him. Their relationship is discovered, Finn disappears, and the incensed Captain burns his daughters’ manuscripts. As his behavior becomes increasingly irrational and cruel, the sisters plan to leave the island: Anne with a mainland fisherman she met on the shore; Emily with Finn, when he’s rescued from solitary confinement in a planned rebellion; and Charlotte on the next supply ship. Happy endings are rare on penal colonies, however, so few survive the ensuing violence.
Conceptually intriguing but narratively uncompelling. Wuthering Heights it’s not.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2001
ISBN: 0-385-50260-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2001
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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