CRAWFISH DREAMS

Name: CRAWFISH DREAMS
Author: Nancy Rawles
ISBN: 0-385-50418-7

by Nancy Rawles ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 18, 2003

Thoughtful, lovingly written tale of one woman’s quiet determination to survive, from playwright and second-novelist Rawles...

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Come hell or high water, Camille Broussard cooks.

A housekeeper for many years at the Catholic rectory in her parish, the widowed Camille still dreams of opening a restaurant featuring the Creole stews and gumbos of her small Louisiana hometown. While she prepares spicy meat pies (a popular item at the funeral home), she reminisces about her peaceful childhood and later move to Los Angeles, where she married her second cousin Henri Broussard and raised seven children amidst the riots and strife of 1960s Watts. The close-knit community of transplanted southern blacks never recovered, but she still thinks of it as home—one she will never leave. Yet by now, according to her unofficial reckoning, she’d have to sell 389 meat pies at full price every year for the rest of her life to earn enough money to retire. A daunting prospect, but it doesn’t look like her children are going to take care of her. Yvette, 48, is a burned-out schoolteacher; Raymond an unemployed longshoreman; Louis a born-again auto mechanic; Anthony a cabinetmaker like his father; Marc an architect with his own firm though no one has ever seen one of his buildings. Meantime, Joseph is an alcoholic drifter; and then there’s Grace, an underachieving lesbian, whose battered, bumper-stickered Datsun is her mother’s secret shame. Camille believes in keeping up appearances, and radical slogans and unorthodox sexuality are nothing to flaunt. Yet she loves all her offspring, sometimes fiercely, sometimes dispassionately, exactly as they are: “two unattached, three unemployed, four unholy, two unashamed, seven unhappy, and one quite unwell.” Sometimes they even love her back. There’s also old Lester Pep, whose unfailing devotion gets Camille through good days and bad. Getting mugged by her own grandson ain’t the worst of it, but nothing is going to stop Camille—or her Creole Kitchen eatery.

Thoughtful, lovingly written tale of one woman’s quiet determination to survive, from playwright and second-novelist Rawles (Love Like Gumbo, 1997, not reviewed).

Pub Date: March 18, 2003

ISBN: 0-385-50418-7

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2003

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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MAGIC HOUR

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2006

Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.

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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

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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THE CATCHER IN THE RYE

by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951

A strict report, worthy of sympathy.

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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.