A thrilling premise and a strong heroine hampered by shaky execution.
In this debut romance novel, a young woman becomes infatuated with a stranger and tries to track her down in New York City.
In 1970, New York City isn’t the most hospitable place for homosexuals and lesbians, and open dating isn’t a viable option. Many of them seek social solace in underground bars and clubs largely hidden from the public’s view. Imogene LaPin becomes a regular at one, Johnny’s, but typically fends off the advances of both men and women alike, with her sexuality largely a mystery, in part even to herself. But one night, she mistakes a glass of undiluted gin for water and knocks it back with abandon. Under the liberating influence of its effects, she asks a woman she met earlier that night to dance. When Imogene wakes the next day in a fuguelike fog, she realizes that she knows nothing about the woman she met and frantically decides to somehow find her. Meanwhile, she has an unusual deal with her best friend, Andy Wink, that the two will marry on St. Patrick’s Day if at that time they’re both still single. Wink is gay and looks forward to the social respectability such an arrangement will bring, and so he actively discourages and even attempts to sabotage Imogene’s search. In this first installment of a planned trilogy, Quantaíne memorably depicts a social cosmos born in response to nearly ubiquitous prejudice. New York figures prominently like a geographic protagonist, a city of deep contradictions, both a magnet for the progressive vanguard and a home to timeless discrimination. This unconventional tale is as refreshingly bold as its lead character, Imogene. There simply aren’t many contemporary novels that explore the romantic plight of homosexuals and lesbians in New York City during the 1970s, a group that didn’t benefit as quickly and obviously as others from the sexual revolution that began the previous decade. In addition, the book brims with delightfully eccentric characters: Wink was born to a Jewish mother in Germany who was sent to a concentration camp and was brought to the United States by adoptive parents who were Nazis. Furthermore, Imogene is a fascinatingly unclassifiable heroine and revels in her resistance to the conventional categories of sexual identity: “I won’t be forced to be part of any group, gay or straight, that assumes they can exert any kind of control over me.” But the book loses a lot of steam after the first 100 pages, and its buoyant pace slackens into a lumbering crawl. What would have made an electric novella is drawn out into an overly ambitious epic. In addition, the prose, especially the dialogue, is consistently overwritten and overwrought, delivering the kind of lines one would expect from a daytime soap opera. Speaking to her cat, Imogene says, “My poor little, dear little, innocent little, perfect little Pansy. It’s just that I met someone last night, Pansy. And, I’m positive she’s the person I’ve been looking for all my life.”
A thrilling premise and a strong heroine hampered by shaky execution.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-940548-01-5
Page Count: 383
Publisher: Cantine Kilpatrick Publications
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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