Utterly hokey, written in faux-shanachie prose (“His father had been hung for participating in plots treasonous and bloody”)...
A languid, quasi-epic account of one family’s fortunes in Ireland and around the globe.
Williams (As It Is In Heaven, 1999, etc.) lays on the blarney in his very first line (“In an autumn long ago, the Foleys crossed the country into the west like the wind that heralds winter”) and keeps it coming at a pretty steady pace in this family saga about the Foleys, who started out in Carlow and made their way, in the best Celtic style, to the four corners of the world. Francis Foley, the patriarch of the clan, marries the beautiful and headstrong Emer O’Suilleabhain, and becomes a tenant farmer on the estate of an absentee landowner. Fascinated by the stars, Francis steals a telescope from the manor house and has to flee with his four sons (for Emer refuses to leave). They wander west and settle in a remote wilderness near the Atlantic coast. Francis Foley’s wanderlust is inherited by his boys, all of whom run off themselves in some more or less dramatic fashion. Finbar marries the beautiful gypsy girl Caitlin and makes his home in her perpetually roving caravan, while his twin brother Finan travels to France and enters a monastery, eventually voyaging on to Africa as a missionary. Tomas emigrates to America, where he gets mixed up in Fenian politics in New York, flees west, joins the army, and winds up in Wyoming as a surveyor with the cavalry. There, he is finally reunited with his baby brother Teige, who, a horse farmer in Canada, wandered a bit far off his ranch one day. What goes around truly comes around in the end.
Utterly hokey, written in faux-shanachie prose (“His father had been hung for participating in plots treasonous and bloody”) and freighted with symbolism (a twin brother becomes the father of twin daughters—twice!) that’s heavier than soda bread.Pub Date: March 13, 2002
ISBN: 0-446-52840-4
Page Count: 305
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2001
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
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