Tom Jones meets Waiting to Exhale against a backdrop of the black music business: a wildly uneven examination of the dissonances within black American culture. Former Village Voice music critic, nonfiction journalist (Elevating the Game, 1992, etc.), and novelist (Urban Romance, 1994) George hasn't got much in the way of literary chops, but he has found a subject: the devolution of black music from '70s soul to disco to rap, as experienced through the rise of Derek Harper, a middle-class, moderately talented songwriter from Queens. Son of a stern undertaker, whose business success serves as an index of the rise of crack and black-on-black murder, Derek's course is set when R&B music promoter Edgecombe Lennox recruits him: He'll drop out of college, hang around with musicians instead of taking a job, and hit on available women instead of staying true to childhood sweetheart Candi. The novel sings in these early scenes of black Queens, but then takes a bizarre and tasteless turn: a woman Derek has been having a kinky affair with is murdered with his anatomically ambitious dildo. Somehow, though, the story survives this John Irvingesque-capade. Taking over the management of an early rap tour, Derek witnesses and becomes part of a scary, violent, yet undeniably powerful new phenomenon—and he learns to cover up rape by rappers, to deal with gangbangers and drug kingpins, to hustle groupies, and to write songs. It's this material, and the portraits of Derek's more serious relationships with a group of successful black women, that elevate a novel that otherwise would be a tin-eared B-side single into a credible, if minor, hit. Derek's reunion with childhood sweetheart Candi, and his decision to start a community arts center with proceeds from his one success, shows that this is one male author who can dish out wish-fulfillment with the best of them. Sweet, raunchy, and, when the author doesn't flinch, genuinely arresting.
Pub Date: April 16, 1996
ISBN: 0-399-14169-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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