A novel tough talking, unlovely, and screaming for attention.
A manic first novel follows a desperate clutch of Illinois high-school girls whose friendship makes up for the depressing facts of their middle-class lives.
In alternating voices, O’Connor presents three young women whose ill-fated attempts to take some control over their troubled senior year continue to have profound repercussions 15 years later. At Holland High in 1988, Cherry uses the example of her coke-snorting single mother to get as wasted as possible and skip school; former homecoming queen Amy harbors deep resentment of her parents for favoring her retarded older sister, Callie, and keeping her institutionalized; and Rennie, an honor student, chooses her route to ruin by losing her virginity to her lecherous drama teacher. All of them find release in cutting themselves with knives. In their friendship with each other, called the Bitch Posse, they swear loyalty forever and promise “to put no friends or lovers before one another,” which, in the end, proves unsustainable. The treachery of men does intrude, in the form of Cherry’s abusive boyfriend and Rennie’s manipulative married lover, Mr. Schafer. To play as raunchy as the boys seems to be what the three are after (“You have to hurt if you want to feel anything at all”), but “Let’s go get wasted” is the sad refrain. Years later, Cherry is stuck in a mental institution, Amy suffers a miscarriage and a soured marriage in Upper Michigan, while Rennie, now a published novelist and California high-school teacher, finds herself addicted to seducing the young men in her charge. As a newcomer, O’Connor makes an aggressive stance here against so-called chick-lit—“and all forms of lying,” she notes. The result is more in-your-face, reality women’s fiction, but still formulaic in its way, with plenty of clitoral sex, women’s friendships that outweigh their relationships with men, bad choices and self-destructive behavior. The writing, in both cases, remains a shameful afterthought.
A novel tough talking, unlovely, and screaming for attention.Pub Date: May 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-312-33392-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2005
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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