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MY FATHER'S HANDS

Plodding, programmatic memoir-fiction—about a father who is never quite successful financially but who leaves a lasting impression on his writerly son—that nonetheless deserves respect for its single-minded, dissertation-like affection. Despite the undistinguished prose, we come to care for the old man. The story begins on an Ohio farm where narrator Bo, a junior in high school, lives with his father, Marcus Northway, a man in his early 40s. Bo tries to write stories while father and mother (Louise) come to understand that rich Aunt Ida left them no money in her will. The father is no hero, then, but a grumpy misfit who lives with half his brain in the clouds. By the time Bo graduates, the father's career ``had ceased to follow an ascending arc and began to take on a zigzag....'' He loses his vice-presidency—he was a ``television pioneer'' who missed the boat—and eventually resigns from the station where he works to become a salesman. Bo narrates such decline, experiences the death of Grandpa Luke, and attends his father's college—as readers, we receive the dubious benefits of dorm-room debates, Marcus's visit to campus, and a visiting poet's residency: ``He had the most incredible voice and accent. His words were thick and seemed drowned in whiskey....'' Throughout, the father remains a cross between Willy Loman (``That's it, Bo, the crucial thing. Enthusiasm!'') and a more successful purveyor of the American Dream. Bo quits college, marries, and writes ad copy while his father first succeeds with a franchise for ``a method of salesmanship'' but then, after unsuccessful surgery for Parkinson's, declines and ends up in a nursing home, where he dies with his loving wife still looking after him. The narrator of the memoir reflects that ``By now I am approaching his age then.'' The second in Terry's Northway series (Tom Northway, 1968): sweet-natured but, in the end, a merely personal account.

Pub Date: Jan. 26, 1992

ISBN: 0-89672-274-0

Page Count: 193

Publisher: Texas Tech Univ. Press

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1991

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THE CATCHER IN THE RYE

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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MAGIC HOUR

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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