by Meredith Ann Fuller illustrated by Joan Anderson ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 3, 2017
A rich, multilayered, and slowly unfolding literary work.
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After losing her father, a Finnish-Irish girl slowly comes to understand her family and personal history in Fuller’s debut novel.
In 1973, 7-year-old Rose Virkkunen is blind—a psychological reaction to her father’s unexplained disappearance. A therapist helps to cure her, but Rose continues her quest to see things more clearly, especially through the art of photography. (Illustrator Anderson (Vector, 2011, etc.) provides Rose’s artworks, which nicely bolster the story.) Rose slowly pieces together information and stories from both the Finnish and Irish sides of her family: “She was interested in history, but not the history her teachers taught. She was interested in the histories of people she knew.” The place that she loves most is Summer Hall (aka Camp Karelia), where Finnish families come for the summer season; there, they stay in cabins, enjoy traditional saunas, and preserve their heritage by telling stories from The Kalevala, Finland’s national epic. As she nears adulthood, Rose struggles with her sexuality and gets drawn into a destructive relationship. Meanwhile, she comes to understand the struggles of an older generation of immigrants, including the hard work that they did in quarries and shipyards. By the novel’s end, she gains fresh insights about her father and herself. Fuller writes lyrically about a seemingly ghost-haunted world, often depicted in Rose’s photographs, which sometimes combine phantomlike images. The book’s opening is full of allusions whose meanings are initially obscure; for example, in an early therapy session, Fuller writes that Rose “felt them collecting in her mouth, the pieces of cedar bark. Her mouth flooded….And the white reindeer flew up, and the white reindeer flew down. Time wobbled and stretched out behind it like a rubber band, until time snapped.” The meanings, however, are effectively revealed bit by bit as part of a mystery that readers investigate alongside Rose. Along the way, every line and image demands and rewards readers’ full attention.
A rich, multilayered, and slowly unfolding literary work.Pub Date: April 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9896081-3-8
Page Count: 322
Publisher: Mountain Water Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 14, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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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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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