A lackluster soap opera with designer labels, expensive restaurants, and sexy locations, but not a spark of glamour. McGehee (Regret Not a Moment, 1993) takes as her heroine Dominique Avallon, the full-lipped daughter of a wealthy French cotton-manufacturing family in Cairo. To escape her sheltered upbringing, 21-year-old Dominique, in a simple navy dress, gets a job as secretary to a handsome but married British officer during the Suez crisis of 1956. When she refuses to put his children through the agony of a divorce, and political turmoil threatens her safety, Dominique marries Anton Renard and takes off for San Francisco in a fawn silk suit. Anton, who comes to bed with whiskey on his breath, is a louse who lives with his mother and lives off his women. Dominique escapes to Manhattan, where she becomes a successful event planner at New York's best department store. On the eve of her greatest triumph, she meets handsome shipping magnate Clay Parker, who sweeps her off her tiny feet and takes her to live in New Orleans. After giving up her career to be a good wife and mother, Dominique is dumped by Clay, who has fallen in love with a younger woman. Dominique buries her sorrow in Sara Lee pound cake, but in an epiphany finally recovers her backbone, resolves never again to depend on any man, and switches to tuna- fish salad. At 37, with her teenage daughter and problematic mother in tow, she moves to Washington, D.C. to build a new life. She resumes her friendship with charismatic Louisiana Senator Mark Patout, who is exponentially wealthier than Clay, but can she once again give up all she has built for the sake of romance? In a cream-colored suit, Dominique taxis to the Russell Senate Office Building. Like its heroine, tasteful but boring.
Pub Date: April 3, 1995
ISBN: 0-316-55854-0
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1995
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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