First-time novelist Stein tells the surprisingly appealing story of a teenager living through the complexity of a premature adulthood. Comparisons between Stein's narrator, 16-year-old Will Sterling, and the immortal Holden Caulfield are inescapableWill wisecracks his way through his strengths, weaknesses, and myriad adolescent confusionsbut the kid also owes something to Joyce's Stephen Dedalus. In place of aesthetics and the loss of faith, Will has math and suburban New Jersey: He's obsessed with probability, doesn't exactly make fast time with the chicks, hangs out with an older married couple and their kids, and suffers his mother's endless stream of desperation dates. ``I came to understand one basic law of probability that I had missed: we are prepared for the last thing that happened and not what's next,'' Will comments after aspects of his stable world begin to get twisted. His older friends, Terri and Shep Kean, split up, and he drifts into an awkward yet instructive sexual relationship with Sara, the only woman in his life who is roughly his age. Sara has a boyfriend, so scenes of her groping and petting with Will carry a certain illicit charge, but Stein presents their initiation in a thoroughly off-kilter manner, spicing the youthful seduction with oddball banter. In Sara, Will has met his matchso much so that you want the two of them to endure into their late 20s rather then pass through the inevitable breakup. Not that Sara is Will's only concern; the novel provides plentiful side excursions from its swift and skillfully compressed plot: basketball, driving to New York, the deaths of fathers, hanging out with black guys, and the usual trials of high schoolall are captured in Stein's adeptly woven fictional net. In other hands, this could have emerged as just another tale of an irritatingly precocious child hero. From Stein, though, the result is an absolute charmer with a spry and sarcastic edge.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1995
ISBN: 1-877946-57-5
Page Count: 172
Publisher: Permanent Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1995
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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