Cheeky homoerotic novel set in Melbourne that will appeal mainly to readers who delight in the joys of sodomy, by the author of Glove Puppet (1998), an Aussie novel about a 20-year-old porn star who for years has been sleeping with his gay stepfather. Drinnan’s tone has dimmed down from the torturedly golden rhetoric of Glove Puppet and has been given over to the setting itself. The novel takes place largely in turreted Juliette, a smashing Art Deco mansion with English leadlight windows and is set in the Poet’s Corner, where all the streets are named after dead English novelists and Romantic poets. Master of the manse is Doc, a Catholic doctor, who lives with Dixon Brearly, writer of a garden/lifestyle column for the Toorak Courier, and with a Vietnamese painter named D—ng. Doc is being blackmailed by Ricky Drouin, a junkie from hell. Meanwhile, deciding to hire a live-in cook and housekeeper, the trio takes on wide-eyed young Murray Fox (formerly Shane Hutton), who has just arrived in Melbourne, been raped, and may have AIDS. Next door to Juliette lives Claudette with her cat Missy: pussy’s bow, the novel’s title, is an Australian idiom that means something like “I’ve had it up to here”—the neck, that is, where a pussy’s bow is tied. The title is as well a play on Murray’s breaking his neck. The story turns on the disposal of the body of a gay basher who attacks D—ng and whom the three kill by misadventure, then have to bury, and then have to invent a cover story for when the dead kid’s pregnant girlfriend shows up looking for him. Meanwhile, Claudette has eyes for Murray. As before, one for the boys, although lighter in tone and far less grim.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-312-25255-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1999
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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