The sections about Joan’s parents are the best because they’re specific and convincing; the...
Contrived first novel sends a troubled American academic to a small town in Sicily.
Joan is the illegitimate daughter of Russell Severance, an American archeologist, and Simona Origo, an anti-Mafia photographer killed in Palermo by a car bomb when Joan was a teen. After years of living aimlessly in America, 35-year-old Joan returns to Sicily to investigate an archive of 16th-century probate records in the tiny town of Valparuta. The mayor who invited her in hopes of sparking tourism doesn’t know she’s just been fired from Brown University for attacking a student. It’s immediately obvious from Joan’s narration that she’s in serious emotional trouble, though we don’t really know why. Equally under the weather is Valparuta’s archivist, Chiesa, whose dilated pupils signal his drug use. Mysterious conversations with a menacing auto mechanic and the enigmatic desk clerk at Joan’s hotel suggest that something very odd is going on in Valparuta. Then, Joan discovers in the archives the confessions of people called benandanti, who in centuries past sent their spirits forth from their sleeping bodies to fight with witches and defend the village. Drawing on folk wisdom inherited from her Sicilian grandmother, Joan discerns that benandanti and witches still inhabit Valparuta, and Chiesa is one of the supernaturally gifted good guys. What exactly happens during these night battles, or what their purpose might be, remains unclear. The author has an irritating habit of dropping in peculiar events, like the request for Chiesa to bring a bathroom scale to the mortally ill mayor’s house. Pages later readers are more likely to be irritated than stunned to learn that “Chiesa has gone to weigh the mayor for God’s reckoning.” Portentous statements like this abound in Bloxam’s well-written but murky text, which is also replete with bad smells, bodily fluids, grimy hallways, burning buildings and other physical indicators of existential angst.
The sections about Joan’s parents are the best because they’re specific and convincing; the ongoing-struggle-between-good-and-evil is so vague and poorly motivated that it verges on ridiculous.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-57962-171-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Permanent Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2008
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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