An intriguing tale of sexual revelation too keen on delivering teachable moments.
A young woman leaves the rural Midwest to become an international model and struggles to heal a deep emotional wound.
In this debut novel, Lucy Pilgrim is born and raised in Iowa and longs to escape her parochial environs to see the world. She attends the University of Iowa but seizes an opportunity to work as a fashion model in New York City, an experience that proves humiliating. Bill Zabub, the head of a prominent agency, suggests that she lose 20 pounds on an achingly prohibitive diet. Lucy finishes college and weds Vic, ‘the man she had decided it logical to marry.' Lucy travels to Japan to try her luck at modeling yet again and strikes up a torrid relationship with Julien, an affair she confesses to Vic, much to his horror. She eventually moves back to the United States and attempts to repair her fractured marriage, but her relationship with Vic ends in an acrimonious divorce. On her way to Barcelona to look for work as a model, Lucy stops in Paris to see Julien, hoping to rekindle their romance, but is disappointed to learn he doesn’t equally reciprocate her affections. Maili effectively captures the vulnerability of women to male predation—Lucy seems to constantly fend off the advances of boorishly presumptuous men and is still haunted by the traumatic memory of her grandfather’s sexual assault. But the entire soap-operatic tale seems to ponderously grasp for some lesson to impart, though which one is never obvious. In addition, the prose is by turns didactic and wooden: “Are you suggesting that I don’t do what I really want to do in case my husband might have an affair while I do?” Like the novel’s protagonist, the author traveled the world as a model, and her knowledge of the industry is irreproachable. But Maili’s story would have been more powerful if she had just painstakingly described that peculiar cosmos rather than so laboriously mining it for articulable wisdom.
An intriguing tale of sexual revelation too keen on delivering teachable moments.Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9996631-0-3
Page Count: 357
Publisher: Chez Soi Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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