A bit too crowded and busy but, still, a fine depiction, in vivid and indelible colors, of a bygone age.
Jazz, history, and love across a hundred years and several continents, in a US debut by British music journalist Neate, winner of the 2002 Whitbread Award.
The origins of jazz are in dispute, but one thing is pretty much agreed on: If it wasn’t born in New Orleans, it damn well grew up there. Just like Lick Holden. Lick started out life at the dawn of the 20th century in Cooltown, one of the many black districts in the Crescent City, and he soaked up music from his earliest days. Working as an ice boy making deliveries to the Storyville saloons, Lick got to know some of the greatest black musicians of the day and got one of them, a local character called the Professor, to give him cornet lessons. Soon he was peddling music rather than ice to the habitués of Storyville’s brothels and bars, and eventually he became known as one of the great horn men of his day. Throughout his career, he was in love with Sylvie Black, his stepsister, with whom he had a brief affair before she ran off and disappeared from his life. Obsessively, futilely, Lick searches for Sylvie in bars and clubs from New York to the Gulf of Mexico, gradually squandering his talent as a musician and turning to a life of petty crime, until he is murdered in the 1920s. Interspersed with the chapters of Lick’s history are accounts of the efforts of one Sylvia Di Napoli, a black singer from London, to trace her ancestry—a search that brings her to America and eventually New Orleans. As we watch the progress of two narrative lines, it’s clear they’ll intersect at some point—but the pleasure of the tale isn’t one of revelations so much as portraiture, the re-creation of a lost world of music, lust, and fame.
A bit too crowded and busy but, still, a fine depiction, in vivid and indelible colors, of a bygone age.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-8021-1727-9
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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