Morris has all the tools. But they need sharpening, and better raw material.
A sprawling fifth outing from Oprah favorite Morris (Songs in Ordinary Time, 1995).
After serving 25 years for murder, 40-ish misfit Gordon Loomis—physically huge, emotionally withdrawn, and stunned by despairing guilt—is released from prison and returns to his Massachusetts hometown under the watchful eye and judgmental presence of his younger brother Dennis: a successful medical professional who has painstakingly distanced himself and his family from the stigma created by Gordon’s accidental smothering of a pregnant neighbor whose house he and another teenager had broken into. Morris’s eye for gritty detail and gift for springing successive narrative traps function almost perfectly in the opening chapters, which vividly render Gordon’s unease with family, co-workers (at the rundown market where he’s a bag boy), and neighbors—notably, foulmouthed adolescent Jada Fossum, who runs drugs to mollify a local dealer harassing her junkie mother, and Delores Dufault, Gordon’s former schoolmate and stubbornly devoted supporter, whose earnest offers of a new life with her constitute a bridge he cannot bring himself to cross. The juxtapositions of Gordon’s timidity with the encircling neighborhood world that keeps drawing him in reveal with poignant irony how his very selflessness and integrity keep getting him into trouble. A crush on a woman who’s beyond him ended, a vitriolic elderly neighbor’s hold over him broken, Gordon perseveres, gets his dream job—and then Morris drops the hammer. In its best pages this is a raw, painful story that carries a powerful emotional charge. But it’s marred by strident overplotting (a new crisis develops every few pages) and unconvincing characterizations, especially that of feral, street-smart Jada, who is, paradoxically, sentimentalized as cloyingly as your generic Dickensian waif. What Morris does with Delores and Gordon is infinitely truer and more moving—until a final-chapter resolution that’s almost insultingly phony.
Morris has all the tools. But they need sharpening, and better raw material.Pub Date: March 8, 2004
ISBN: 0-670-03288-3
Page Count: 380
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2004
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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