An overstuffed but stylish and engrossing thriller with a message that hits home.
Terrorism, the Burmese dictatorship and other dark forces collide when the president’s cousin is kidnapped.
Jacqueline Ross, wealthy actress and black-sheep relative of the Bush-like President Greg Osler, expects to have her every whim catered to, even after she and a handful of other tourists are abducted from a Burmese charter boat. Deprived of everything but the bare necessities of food, clothing, make-up and moisturizers, the pampered harridan experiences a terrible shock when hectoring and tantrums have no effect on the gunmen who force-march her through the jungle. But for others, her ordeal is a godsend, especially after a videotape fingering Al Qaeda for the crime surfaces. The president and his devious political adviser Karla Sneed spin the abduction into renewed public support for the war on terror and a flagging counterinsurgency in Saudi Arabia. The Rangoon military junta plans to leverage a rescue mission into warmer relations with Washington. And a well-connected oil company seizes the moment to lobby for the lifting of American economic sanctions against Burma. The plot thickens when Jacqueline and her fellow captives wash up in a remote village where all their assumptions about good guys and bad guys are cast into doubt. Roach’s sprawling narrative is saddled with a few too many subplots and an excess of progressive soapboxing on everything from petro-politics to media bias to gay rights. It sometimes feels like a Noam Chomsky polemic reworked into a conspiracy theory. Fortunately, Roach is a fluent writer. He paints a vivid panorama of a Burma ruled by cutthroat generals obsessed with numerology, and creates memorable characters like the conniving Karla and the maniacally selfish Jacqueline, who can’t quite process the information when a Buddhist monk tells her that material possessions get in the way of enlightenment. Through her rude awakening to Burmese realities, Roach makes us care about the ongoing tragedy there.
An overstuffed but stylish and engrossing thriller with a message that hits home.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-4392-6491-0
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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