Reading Gardner's second novel (after Keeping Warm, 1987) is like being stuck on a slow merry-go-round with stationary beige horses and no music: It's diverting for the first turn, then you get the feeling you've already been there...again and again and again. The story of Susan Carson, wife and mother, is painted in broad, impressionistic strokes that capture essentials in a few well-chosen words and trust the reader's imagination to fill in the fine points. This technique works with poetic wistfulness until the narrative becomes an endless litany of dashed dreams and dissatisfaction. Susan was a smart, imaginative kid and voracious reader until marriage to a dullard farmer and motherhood glazed her eyes and made her rethink things. Stubborn and determined not to live with regrets, she puts up her chin and endures through the loss of a child, the struggle to maintain a Minnesota farm, and the distance from friends who understand her. At the heart of her troubles is her inability to tolerate a loveless marriage and submit to a man's will. She takes the kids, leaves her husband, moves to town, and opens a boarding house. Her existence becomes even more mundane (though its telling remains lyrical), and the particulars all start to blend together in a mishmash of ambivalence and mistakes, with the blooming milkweed marking time's plodding passage. Susan rekindles some friendships, educates the kids, gets a part-time job, has a few affairs, and so forth. The focus then shifts to her daughter, enabling readers to relive Susan's life in all its obscurity. By the end, we can sing the refrain by heart: Some men are dolts, others untrustworthy, daughters become mothers become grandmothers, and ``nobody's to blame for life.'' A sad ballad in a minor key. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Sept. 6, 1994
ISBN: 0-918949-46-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1994
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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