by Max Phillips ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 3, 1996
Poet Phillips's first novel gives us the standard youngster- on-the-cusp routine and does a nice job of it, too. Unfortunately, however, the momentum builds up past the author's ability to rein it in, and the joyride eventually runs off the road. Nicholas Wertheim, our hero, begins his story at the age of ten. This isn't an arbitrary start: He first meets Julia Turrell then, and that can be said to be the start of all his troubles. Julia is almost a decade his elder, but Nick is precocious enough to fall in love at first sight, and his family is eccentric enough to make his precocity credible: His hippie parents have to be nagged into wearing clothes at home, for example, and Nick and his big sister Del learn how to make out by practicing on each other. Although Julia quickly goes back to Bennington and loses contact with Nick, the two find themselves reunited seven years on, when Nick starts college at Cornell—where Julia is a graduate student. This time his affections are requited, after a fashion: Julia is violent, drunken, unfaithful, temperamental, and as mad as the wind, often disappearing without warning for years at a clip in order to return in a more alluring and passionate guise. Nick is lost. ``Now, a story, as I understand it, is a matter of What Does Our Hero Do Next? The difficulty in telling the story of a cement- assed depressive like me is that our hero does nothing next, and does it over and over.'' Quite. When Julia is out of the picture, Nick mopes around, working at loser jobs, dating loser girlfriends. When Julia breezes back home, he drops everything and falls into bed with her. Eventually he breaks loose and settles down, but by the time he gets around to it, one feels more exhaustion than relief. Immensely likable but far too long (and long-winded): monomania rather than focus.
Pub Date: June 3, 1996
ISBN: 0-316-70620-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1996
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BOOK REVIEW
by Max Phillips
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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SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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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