Silly and sugary stuff. Could better have been packaged as a greeting card of one kind or another.
The French author’s second to appear here (after Snow, 2003), said to be a success in Europe, is a small little tidbit of Hallmarkiana about a musician who lives—and dies—during the Napoleonic era.
Johannes Karelsky, born in 1764, becomes a violinist at age five, after hearing a traveling gypsy’s performance. A child prodigy, two years later he begins performing, soon doing so in all the European courts, acclaimed as “a great violinist, because the music he played came not from his hands but from his heart.” Well, maybe so. Things begin to pale, though, his career stalls, he ages, and, at 31, in 1796, he gets called up for military duty and finds himself a part of Napoleon’s Italian campaign. Desperately wounded on the battlefield and left to die, he’s visited by a mysterious woman—real or imaginary we’ll never know—who gives him water and then sings to him though the night. Could this fateful encounter (he survives!) be an omen in some way related to his driving lifelong desire to compose “the most beautiful opera ever written”? Gee, maybe so. Because he’s been so badly wounded, Johannes is left behind in Venice on desk duty when the rest of the army moves northward—and he’s billeted in the house of one Erasmus, a man without a family who’s a maker of—yes—violins! (“My real homeland is music,” says Erasmus. “I don’t care that much about the rest”). Will Johannes reveal to Erasmus that he himself is a great violinist? (Yes.) Will he have other semi-mystical experiences regarding music, his opera, and the mysterious black violin that hangs on the wall of Erasmus’s workshop? (Yes, yes, and yes.) Will he—gasp—actually compose his brilliant opera? Well, we’re not telling. Read and find out for yourself (it won’t take long).
Silly and sugary stuff. Could better have been packaged as a greeting card of one kind or another.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2003
ISBN: 0-7434-5685-8
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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