by Mary Sullivan ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 2000
Emily's reason enough to look twice at this sensitive, simmering little gem of a debut.
A young girl shocked into silence by her twin's death traces the summer of 1974, as her family races toward deepening crisis.
At a distant glance, Donald Stone’s family might seem like material for an update of Cheaper by the Dozen. The inventor and his uncomplaining wife live with a houseful of children—John, Hope, Sarah, Elizabeth Ruth, Emily, Luke, and baby Owen—in little Cawood, Massachusetts, and vacation in Martha’s Vineyard, where everybody knows everything about everybody else. One of the things everybody knows about the Stones, however, is that their crowded house has seemed empty since their daughter Emily’s twin brother Ham, 11, drowned during their last trip to the Vineyard, and that the family’s never been the same since. Emily has refused to talk, on the grounds that “if I said something now, I'd be like them”; the widening distance between her parents looms like a treacherous gulf; and as everybody waits anxiously to see whether Donald can invent a worthy successor to his Magic Rose (the Tiger Soap and the Supergrow Instant Fertilizer were disappointing flops), such commonplace expressions of irritation as “Dad’ll kill us” come to have an ominous edge. Constantly prodded to break her silence, Emily thinks about talking, and comes closer and closer to forming the words, but still says nothing, even when her silence endangers flirtatious Elizabeth Ruth. When her father packs his troop into a car for a return trip to Martha’s Vineyard, it’s clear that the story is heading toward a showdown, but first-novelist Sullivan, who has a real knack for getting inside Emily without making her sound like a prodigy or a freak, keeps both the nature of her climactic revelations and their import hidden up to the very last minute—and in some ways beyond.
Emily's reason enough to look twice at this sensitive, simmering little gem of a debut.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2000
ISBN: 1-58195-025-X
Page Count: 176
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2000
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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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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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