There’s nothing here to attract either chick-lit or Washington novel readers.
Chick lit scales Capitol Hill in this breathless first novel about a perky blonde fundraiser. Sexton has a Republican fundraising background; Johnston is a playwright.
Temple Sachet, the blonde with the big boobs, has inherited her mother’s Midas touch and Republican politics. She hates to leave her Louisiana hometown for St. Louis on her mother’s remarriage, but the good news is that her stepfather Daddy Gil, a bank president, is just plain adorable. Once Temple gets the chance to intern in Washington., D.C., as a Ray of Hope, she catches Potomac Fever and never looks back. It doesn’t matter that Temple is clueless about political issues (never discussed); she’s phenomenal at massaging donors. We learn all about click lines, Direct Mail and Major Donors. She’s only 29 when she becomes finance director for the Republican Senate Campaign Committee. The senators are mostly creeps, slobs or weirdos; one of them grabs her breasts out on the street. Temple does have one crisis of conscience (“I was raising all this money, but what was the point?”), but it’s fleeting. A workaholic who also loves to party, Temple doesn’t have much luck with men; most of the staffers on the Hill are gay. Her best friend is Goldie, a divine Yorkshire Terrier who rides in her purse. The authors provide incidents but no plot and no nuances. In Temple’s telling, everything blurs: the struggle to reach financial targets, the senatorial rivalries, the heartbreak of Daddy Gil’s death, the morale boost of hair extensions. If there’s a climax, it’s the moment she’s stabbed in the back by one of her few human friends, but Temple handles it well: “Restraint coursed through my veins instead of blood.” Goldie would have consoled her, but the dog has died, and her best prospect for a boyfriend, “an Asian JFK” who’s an animal-rights activist, has been using her to network. It’s time to leave the cesspool.
There’s nothing here to attract either chick-lit or Washington novel readers.Pub Date: July 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-59921-459-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Lyons Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2008
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
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