A highly charged, deeply eroticized historical and contemporary fiction from the American-born English author of two short-story collections and the novels Trust (1988) and Rose Reason (1992). Flanagan writes about women who are impelled by the urgent, often violent emotions they conceal beneath dutiful exteriors, and who are usually disappointed by the men to whom they confide their secrets. There's an identifiable, implicit homage to Henry James in her penetrating analyses of the ways in which women think, feel, and behave differently from men. This novel begins as Celia Pippet (``a snotty middle class sourpuss''), having stolen a scandalous objet d'art from the British Museum, travels to France to learn the truth about eponymous title character Adäle Louisante—a mysterious Parisian beauty whose involvement in a scandalous love affair, 50 years earlier, had led to her even more mysterious death. Accompanied by friends who both share and mistrust her zeal, Celia investigates L'affaire Adäle, striking gold when she meets Adäle's onetime nurse Blanche Jessel (could a character's name be more Jamesian?), whose reluctant memories include her characterization of Paris between the World Wars as ``a sexual theme park.'' Flanagan's tendencies toward garish imagery and runaway melodrama are actually quite successfully concentrated in the thrillingly evoked figure of Jonas Sylvester, a proto-Nazi gynecologist who had imagined the lustrously beautiful Adäle the prototype for a scientifically created perfect race—and whose workmanlike passion for his headstrong Trilby becomes both the making and the breaking of her. Adäle is, alas, far too passive to be fully credible, and Flanagan never gets convincingly inside her mind and feelings (or, indeed, those of any of the novel's characters). Oddly enough, it scarcely matters, for almost everything else works in this expertly fashioned romantic tale. Henry James might have disapproved, but one suspects he would have devoured every page of Adäle with agreeably guilty pleasure.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-393-04547-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
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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