An engaging novel about one woman’s journey from faded to fabulous.
Rocco (The Hollywood Facelift, 1995) offers a kind of Sex and the City for the baby boomer generation in this highly amusing and surprisingly clever romantic comedy.
Suzanne Robins, an early morning traffic reporter in San Francisco, has a serious problem: She keeps imagining her own death. As she approaches 60, a monumental birthday, she begins to have terrible nightmares about her demise. When she seeks professional advice, her psychiatrist tells her to try planning her own funeral. Rather than focus on the morbid, Robins goes in another direction—she cuts her hair and starts caring about her makeup, clothing, fitness and overall style. With the help of her transgendered best friend, Jill (formerly Phil), Robins enters the latter part of her life with new optimism and a sense of self that she’d abandoned when her marriage ended, her daughter grew up and her life settled into a predictable routine. Rocco, a Sausalito, Calif.–based screenwriter, has a keen sense of dialogue, with fun, rapidly paced and detailed exchanges: “[Jill] scrutinizes each pair of my shoes. ‘These might be worth something, look at that heel! They’re borderline vintage.’…‘What if it comes B-A-C-K?’ I cry.” Each chapter features new twists, such as Robins trying online dating or considering cosmetic surgery. Rocco makes Robins’ tiny triumphs, like trying on a pair of Jimmy Choos, important to readers, and she has a sense of humor that’s affectionate yet tough on her characters. She also has a strong sense of how mature women think and communicates Robins’ thoughts so well that readers will likely feel as if Robins is a confidante. Although the novel’s cover art is subpar, the words inside are sassy, fresh and full of vitality.
An engaging novel about one woman’s journey from faded to fabulous.Pub Date: Feb. 19, 2013
ISBN: 978-1480257498
Page Count: 244
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 27, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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