Strained, stagy, and schematic.
A pseudonymous first novel tries too hard to be witty, perceptive, and profound as it explores the long consequences of loyalties and love under stress in wartime France and Ireland.
Moving back and forth between past and present, Ireland and France, the story spans the week it takes Laure McManus’s father, French aristocrat Armand de Coucy, to die following a fall on his estate, Colonfay. At the time, the old man had been attempting to saw a broken limb from the sinister 300-year-old cedar tree under which criminals have been executed. As he lies dying now, waiting to make peace with his estranged children, Laure and Patrick, he revisits the past—along with his son-in-law, Irish-born Dermot McManus, a poet and advertising consultant who does the Irish boyo to the max as he goes on long riffs about God, alcohol, and the years gone by, while frequently quoting from Yeats, Wilde, and other clever Irish lads. Laure and Patrick can’t forgive their father for seeming to cooperate with the Germans during the French Occupation and for assenting to the death of local Jews. Laure is especially harrowed by his failure to help her when she was sexually molested by her Fascist uncle. Haunted by the past, and sexually frigid until she has a brief encounter with a visiting American, Laure wants to divorce Dermot, who’s taken a mistress. But Dermot still loves Laure, though the marriage was badly strained when their only daughter Penelope was killed. Dermot’s Irish past is no sunnier than Laure’s: His father, who fought for the British in WWI, was later murdered for being a British Loyalist, and Dermot fled Ireland after discovering his body. As Armand’s death draws near, both Laure and Dermot learn a few painful secrets, and finally understand that war, like love, can be messy and cruel but also offer opportunities for redemption.
Strained, stagy, and schematic.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2000
ISBN: 1-57962-068-X
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Permanent Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2000
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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