Taylor-Hall writes well, but little actually happens in this debut novel. Carrie Marie Mullins is a bluegrass fiddler living in Lexington, Ky. During her ``wildest-of-the-wild period,'' she makes a baby with a stranger from Georgia who's just passing through, a decision rationalized by the fact that her permanent crush, musician Cap Dunlap, is flirting with another woman. For a while she plays in a female band known as ``Pearl's Girls,'' but when Dunlap invites her to join his more successful group, she does, becoming ``a woman with a baby in a man's world.'' Then her daughter dies in an accident. Dunlap discovers her breaking down and delivers her to his grandmother's farm, where she begins to recover. This is all interesting, in a well-worn sort of way, since there's nothing new about an elusive bad-boy musician or a wild woman on the loose. But once Mullins hits the farm, she spends much too much time wandering around enjoying nature. Taylor-Hall has simply not given her narrator enough to do. There's a little feminist revelation thrown in about her own parents (``Mama, given her experience with Daddy, should have helped us change our way of thinking about men. But no. At Christmastime to this day, I still get a box of sexy lingerie—you know, teddies and silk bikinis and merry widows—with a card saying, `Love from Santa.' What kind of mother is that, pray tell?''). But all the attempts to create order—in the form of a plot—out of chaos, are too little and too late. Taylor-Hall's prose has a lyrical rhythm that does successfully imitate bluegrass music, but it's often interrupted by embarrassingly silly, folksy ruminations like ``They say a fiddler's bound to fiddle,'' or by plain self-pity. Like its main character, this novel breaks down in the middle, but it never recovers.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-393-03735-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1994
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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