by Michael Upchurch ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 30, 1995
The latest by the author of Air (1986) and The Flame Forest (1989) can't decide how much it wants to conform to the conventions of esoteric ghost fiction. Here, Upchurch's controlled and cautious style ill serves his murkier themes: some trendy ideas about gender, voyeurism, narcissism, and the haunting power of AIDS. Two narratives collide in this somewhat listless story. The first concerns the short marriage of Walker Popman, a divorced middle-aged photographer, and his wife, Susan, a mid-20s receptionist, whose very plainness, for him, is her most attractive feature. Walker's beautiful first wife was a strange sexual adventurer, a polymorphously perverse dynamo who tried to enlist Walker in her bisexual shenanigans. Instead, he developed an interest as a voyeur, recording his wife in all sorts of sordid encounters. When she predicted their divorce by tarot, she also envisioned his premature death—a death that occurs now while the newlyweds are traveling cross-country. Their trip has been haunted by all sorts of ghosts and visions that become even stronger when Walker has a heart attack in a Chicago museum. Back home in Seattle, Susan discovers that Walker had been seeing a psychiatrist, Jerry Plume—a detached and unemotional homosexual who found himself turned on by his sessions with Walker, the first time his professional boundaries had been tested. Though Plume's first love was the wild, flamboyant son of his own shrink, he maintained a fairly sedate sexual life afterward and imagined himself untouched by the widening chain of viral infection. But just as Susan comes closer to resolving her apparent madness, Plume's current lover tests positive, throwing the psychiatrist into a tailspin. Susan saves herself, and casts out her demons, by breaking the spell of Walker's ex, who managed to seduce the confused widow in her grief. The AIDS-haunted melodrama fancies itself much more, and it also rests on some questionable notions about the threat to the general populace. Careful writing can't disguise sloppy thinking.
Pub Date: Oct. 30, 1995
ISBN: 0-393-03865-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1995
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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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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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