Story: not scary. Writing: terrifying.
A tale about Bigfoot filled with waxen prose, stick-figure characters and bad-TV dialogue.
Hansen, whose last product was 2004’s It’s in the Book, Bob!, a Bob Eubanks bio co-written with the gameshow god, isn’t big on subtlety. Boom! Trees splinter as a Weyerhaeuser truck driver mysteriously disappears in the Washington woods. Ty Greenwood, a Seattle dot-com tycoon, grabs a flagon of single malt, leaps into his 1956 Mercedes-Benz 300 SL Gullwing and hurtles through the night to kill himself, freaked because he’s seen Bigfoot. Top-dollar lawyers go hiking and get crunched by Sasquatch, one of them departing earth like so: “…his neck had just suffered the catastrophic C2-C3 break, rendering his body from his shoulders to his toes into just so much flaccid meat.” An ancient Indian chief wakes screaming on a Hollywood movie set, remembering his encounter decades past with…you guessed it, Bigfoot. A newscaster, bitchy but “drop-dead gorgeous,” schemes toward the big time by getting the scoop on Hideous Hairy. And on and on. The Scary Movie antics mildly entertain, but what’s truly frightening is that Hansenworld seems inhabited solely by broad-shouldered dudes, darling children, crusty-but-fair newspaper editors and guys with grunts for names (Mitch, Jack, Ben, Ty, Mac). Even more spine-searing are sentences like this, describing a hawk circling overhead: “Deep inside his small brain a circuit was receiving a vibration on the frequency band just slightly above that of his material world.” Yeah, just like that.
Story: not scary. Writing: terrifying.Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2007
ISBN: 0-7432-9473-4
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 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
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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