Veteran Bailey (Kitty and Virgil, 2000, etc.) navigates with economy and grace between two lives and among many time-frames....
An adoring nephew pays homage to his childhood savior, a star of European operettas, in a masterly, unsentimental evocation of childhood and exile.
A train is taking a small boy and his affectionate but agitated father across snow-covered Romania. The boy’s mother has mysteriously disappeared, and, in Paris, he will be sent on alone to his uncle in London. It’s 1937, Romania is turning fascist, and seven-year-old Andrei Petrescu will now turn into Andrew Peters. Although he will never see his parents again, he’ll get a magnificent welcome from Uncle Rudolf and his devoted entourage. Rudolf Peterson (formerly Rudi Petrescu) is one of Romania’s most famous sons; his thrilling tenor and dashing good looks have made this consummate ladies’ man as rich as Croesus. What matters for little Andrew, though, is his uncle’s outpouring of love, which offsets Andrew’s recurrent nightmares. The boy always comes first for Rudolf, even if it means displacing a hot blond so he can cuddle his nephew to sleep. Still, Andrew will understand, in good time, that his uncle’s cheerful front hides a deep melancholy. Rudolf was once headed for great roles in grand opera, but he succumbed to the easy money of operettas, which he now views with contempt. It will be 11 years before Rudolf tells Andrew his parents’ fate: his half-Jewish mother was raped and murdered by anti-Semites, and his father drowned himself in the Seine. Has Rudolf been overprotective? Not in Andrew’s eyes, for, after his uncle’s early retirement and a brief, joyless marriage of his own, he devotes himself entirely to Rudolf’s business affairs, “the contented prisoner of his melancholy.” His uncle’s death changes nothing, and here Bailey allows Andrew to slip too easily into the unlived life, that staple of English literary fiction.
Veteran Bailey (Kitty and Virgil, 2000, etc.) navigates with economy and grace between two lives and among many time-frames. This British author’s skills—and magic touch for showing love at work—make for a texture unusually rich.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-312-31834-0
Page Count: 192
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2003
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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