A charming, competent, and harmless addition to lad lit.
A quick, amusing debut novel about the traumas of turning 30; dealing with a meddling parent; and navigating a social world comprised entirely of perma-exes and their new loves.
Boswell (stories: Trouble with Girls, 2003) sets the whole in Atlanta during the 1996 Olympics. Gerald Brinkman, a pot-smoking, grad-school dropout who works as a rock critic for the local alternative weekly, is a man on the brink of making big decisions about life, love, work, and his gratuitously tangled family past. At a wedding for his ex-girlfriend Nora, Gerald bumps into his crush, Sasha, a “simian-eyed, Bombay-born drug rep” who is married to Aaron, a philandering surgeon and grown-up jock boy, who also happens to be another ex-boyfriend of Nora’s. And that evening, Gerald picks up his troublesome father, a potbellied, Harvard-educated, T-shirt- and tennis shoe–wearing manic intellectual who may be even more bumbling and confused than Gerald himself. Dad, who has sold the family homestead and seems intent on moving into his son’s studio apartment while “fixing” his computer and tagging along to rock concerts, is fairly bursting with scary family secrets about the death of Gerald’s mother and his own poor health. Meanwhile, the family of exes are playing a furious game of musical chairs with sex, affection, and work: Dad and Gerald camp out at Nora’s for awhile; Nora has some spectacular revelations about the possible father of her child; Nora’s new husband becomes Gerald’s new employer; Aaron continues to schtup the nurses, and Sasha follows Gerald to indie rock shows, bakes casseroles, and proffers wine and dinner invitations. Oh, and a Major New York Music Magazine wants him too. Gerald absorbs it all with wry, intelligent commentary and few surprises.
A charming, competent, and harmless addition to lad lit.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-385-33852-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2005
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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