A light tale of suburban warfare waged by the gardening elite.
A gardening competition leads to sounds of snipping in the backyard.
Blistering and broiling in a steam room someone forgot to properly calibrate, Jasper Burdick, owner of suburban Livia’s most prestigious garden center, dreams of a landscape bursting with enormous flowers of every ilk—all purchased at Burdick’s Plant World, of course—but each bloom has a human face. Burdick’s Best Yard Contest is born. Rumors of the competition and its prize money spread throughout Livia, a town riddled with more than its fair share of plant lovers. Draper carefully arranges his cast of loopy characters, turning the town of Livia into a living garden. Dr. Phyllis Sproot plays the villain. After completing a mail-order course from the Honey Larson-Bayles School of Agronomy, the previously merely pushy Sproot blooms into a domineering, manipulative know-it-all. Utterly cowed by Sproot’s expertise, Marta Poppendauber worries that her own gardens will fall short. Once Sproot hears about the contest, though, she abandons her vicious pruning of Marta’s gardens in favor of espionage. She sends Marta (in various ridiculous disguises) to snoop among the competitors’ plants, quickly discovering that the Fremonts are her natural enemies. Oblivious to Sproot’s villainous machinations, George and Nan Fremont have created a marvelous garden in their backyard, nearly bankrupting themselves in the process. Sproot is stunned to discover the Fremonts have defied all horticultural sanity by planting beautiful but hallucinogenic angel’s trumpets. Debut novelist Draper lavishly describes the gardens of Livia, lingering on begonias and lilacs, clematis and monarda, not to mention Sproot’s original blend of yuccas and a coreopsis-salvia-hollyhock blend. With so much detail, it’s sometimes hard to see the gardens for the plants, but the silly shenanigans keep the pace speedy.
A light tale of suburban warfare waged by the gardening elite.Pub Date: Nov. 25, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61773-305-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014
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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