by Mary Pleshette Willis ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 12, 1999
A lugubrious first novel describing the slow coming of age of a Jewish-American Princess in Manhattan during the 1960s and “70s. Josie Davidovich has the misfortune to grow up along the frontier separating two very different epochs. A daughter of the baby boom, she’s raised in a prosperous if rather starchy Jewish family on the Upper East Side. Her father, a successful gynecologist, is progressive enough to explain (and prescribe) oral contraceptives for her as a teenager, but she’s still expected—and, more or less, expects herself—to meet a nice German Jew at dancing school and settle down to a life of cozy domesticity. The world she is raised for, though, no longer exists by the time she’s old enough to claim it, and so Josie ends up as a researcher at a midtown magazine in the late “60s. Through her business contacts, she meets and falls in love with Gus Housman, a divorced midwesterner who abandoned architecture to become a documentary filmmaker and has ended up in New York working for CBS. Although Gus is ten years her senior, Josie decides that he’s the man for her. She announces their engagement and sets about planning the perfect wedding. Before it goes off, however, tragedy strikes when Gus breaks his back in a swimming accident. Josie’s family urge her to break off the relationship—what hope of happiness is there in a marriage to a paralytic?—but Josie refuses to abandon Gus. After much hardship, the two succeed in their careers (Gus launches a cable network, Josie produces TV documentaries) and also in their private life, when Josie becomes pregnant. But lurking in the shadow of Josie’s hard-earned happiness is an ugly shadow from her father’s past. A literate soap opera, decently done but unremarkable.
Pub Date: Sept. 12, 1999
ISBN: 0-679-44696-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1999
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by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2006
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
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by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951
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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