A former Peace Corps veteran debuts with a series of short stories set in Senegal (all but one about the same character) that neatly skewer cultural misapprehensions, though not much else. The unrelated tale, ``Edge of the Sky,'' slyly sends up official America abroad as it limns the comedy of errors that ensues when a frumpy, unhappy American ambassador's wife accompanies her African maid to a local soothsayer. Told that ``someone in your house will be unfaithful,'' the wife naturally suspects her boorish spouse, but she has some infidelities of her own in mind. The seven linked stories record the decline and fall of bad-girl Darren, an unlikely Peace Corps recruit. Darren seems naughty in the innocent manner of an Evelyn Waugh protagonist: ``When I was twenty-five, I ran away from home. My parents cheered me on. By that time I had lost a series of demeaning jobs and let my boyfriend get away. More than once I told my mother she didn't love me, just to watch her cry.'' The Peace Corp takes her on because she has, ``such a nice face'' and resembles ``everybody's sister, everybody's best friend from high school.'' Once in Senegal, Darren is soon in trouble again. She is hopelessly incompetent at her assigned task of teaching English; she has an affair with her language instructor and must fly to Washington, DC, for an abortion; another love affair is equally disappointing; she gets involved in a riot; and by the end she has taken to drinking too much to fight the void within. This soul-sick, suddenly gloomy Darren somehow doesn't gibe with the sassy girl of the beginning. Much lively writing and a vividly evoked African milieu distinguish this debut, but Darren ultimately disappoints, becoming merely a conduit for action and aperáus. (Some of these stories have previously appeared in The New Yorker and other magazines.)
Pub Date: April 17, 1995
ISBN: 0-395-68998-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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