Following up on her 1987 novel Sleeping with the Enemy (made into a star vehicle for Julia Roberts), Price returns with a terrific suspenser with a softly ironic fade-out—and a lust for mainstream status. Price, telling us only what her characters do, not what they feel, has the right ingredients for a suspense classic but decides from the start to play for different stakes than the reader expects. The first third is a compassionate, deeply gripping story about Mary Eliot, a wallflower mother of four who has no college degree and is married to insane novelist/college teacher Randal Eliot. Randal has been hospitalized seven times, often having dictated a novel to his wife just before his breakdowns. She types them up while he's away—and he's now worthy of a Pulitzer. Truth is, to keep the family together and Randal employed by his Nebraska university, Mary writes the novels all on her own, from scratch. Randal is far too scattered to write even one legible word. He's also a monster, aglow with his literary success but absolutely insecure about his ``talent.'' During a trip abroad, Randal has another breakdown, pins a paper flower to the back of his hand, and is again hospitalized by Mary, who sits down in a London apartment to write his new novel. Price, who cannibalizes her own works for Mary's oeuvre, is at her most impressive here, as when Mary rents a typewriter: ``The rental shop was small and dusty. Mary waited her turn patiently and watched wreckers demolish a building across the street. Old rooms with their pastel plasterwork of flowers and fruit stood naked above traffic, like underwear or intimate conversations violently exposed to strangers.'' When Randal dies (or commits suicide), Mary marries his prospective biographer, a much too two-dimensionally violent literary fanatic. The first half is pure gold. Don't even wait for the movie.
Pub Date: June 2, 1992
ISBN: 0-671-74993-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1992
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
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