Wasting no time in preliminaries, Stewart (Belladonna, 1992, etc.) opens with mutilated model Cristina Parigi's frantic, fatal, very public plunge into the East River and then, within a few pages, shows her employer already erotically re-creating herself as Cristina. Why is Joanna Lefever—married to brilliant British psychologist Stephen Lefever, mother of budding beauty Bella, successful head of Designing Women, ridiculously wealthy by inheritance (much sumptuous detail about her Mercedes and the family charitable trust she heads)- -so desperately taken by the desire to masquerade as dead Cristina, taking her Upper West Side apartment and making herself over with clothes, scent, wigs? She thinks it's the commanding presence of Mephistophelian painter Louis van Nyman, whom she repeatedly follows out of receptions and into luxurious cars for quick, brutal, upscale sex. But as one of Stephen's new colleagues at Berkeley painstakingly explains to him—after the rift between Mr. and Ms. Right widens when his chair at Columbia fires him (making it clear that his visiting professorship has depended on the funding they've all counted on from his wife's trust)—she's so maddened by grief over the death of their baby Luke two years ago that she literally can't bear to be herself. Stephen (along with all but the dimmest of readers) already knows just how true that is, since Joanna can't forgive herself for cutting short Luke's agonized bout with cancer by administering a merciful injection, and has been battling her own demons—personified by Luke's blackmailing former nurse—ever since. If she looked into her new lover's rÇsumÇ, she'd see that she was due for all the punishment she craved, since Louis specializes in harrowingly realistic studies of martyrs' dying torments. Workaday suspense alternating with steamy soft-focus sex tableaux, by turns hypnotic and silly (``he could see through her skin to the subcutaneous structure of her body'')—like a more elaborately plotted version of Damage.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-06-017767-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1993
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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