A coming-of-age tale with memorable and poignant characters but uneven prose.
In this debut novel, a man looks back on growing up with his five siblings in a family shaped by dysfunction and selfish maternal ambition.
In this first-person, coming-of-age narrative, Blydasafaulk Cain Bates has returned to his Southern hometown. The sight of the old corner house he grew up in sparks a 50-year-old memory of the day he saw his disabled eldest brother jabbed with an umbrella and called a “crippled urchin” by a passing stranger. The adult Cain continues recalling his life with his older sister, four brothers, and the cold mother who manipulated and dominated them all. Cain refers to her as “the mother,” an indication of the emotional remove he cultivated as self-protection. Dumas paints a poignant picture of a child who absorbed early on that his mother had no love to give, and who learned to scavenge crumbs of warmth and affection from his siblings. (The unassertive father is barely a presence.) The protagonist’s eldest brother, Ferdinand Freudenham “Freud” Bates (the children’s outlandish names are a symptom of the mother’s obsessive grandiosity), is the heart of Cain’s narrative. Intended from birth to be the family’s golden boy, Freud was physically disabled as a child and prone to seizures due to a brain tumor. Cain observes his brother as boy and adult with both guilt and compassion. Regrettably, Dumas undercuts his impressive characters and dilutes Cain’s narrative with numerous verbose, pedantic digressions: “If you be one of the rare persons who needed support that wasn’t present or if inquietude frequented your life as warmth passed you by, then follow my thoughts for a moment….The place where one departs from is no longer the same place. It might have the appearance of sameness. Quantumwise, it is majorly altered.” Nor is the book served by the stilted “dear reader” device (“Reader, before I return to our story”; “At this juncture, dear reader”). And the sudden, cryptic ending seems to belong to a different novel entirely, or at least needs further explanation. Errors in the text (such as “spill” for spiel; “thrills” for trills; and “self” for shelf) require attention as well.
A coming-of-age tale with memorable and poignant characters but uneven prose.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-975992-01-9
Page Count: 166
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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