A mistake that Hond really ought to have aborted.
Soggy second novel after Hond’s witty debut (The Baker, 1998), this one about a rapidly aging twentysomething who writes unproduceable plays and can’t settle down to anything or with anyone.
Moss Messinger lives in a cheap Manhattan apartment where he's bothered and shat upon by pigeons in the airshaft, eludes commitment to his gorgeous, tenderhearted girlfriend Danielle (a nurse, oddly willing to nurture the insistently needy Moss), and maintains via continental divide a détente with his (also gorgeous) mother Nina, a jazz pianist living in Europe with her husband and fellow musician Anton. Worried that Moss needs her, Nina flies to America. Anton cheats on her, confesses, they break up, and Nina re-returns to NYC to live with Moss, who's recently sans Danielle, thanks to his somewhat surly reaction to her unexpected pregnancy. Enter Moss's “Super Yuppie” friend Boris (who has struck it rich running “an online fertility agency called LittleEinsteins.com”), who admires Nina's chops, and, Dear Reader, we have a second pregnancy on our hands. Unmanned by Nina’s unmotherly (though, come to think of it, quite literally maternal) behavior, Moss retreats with the understandably conflicted Boris to the latter’s posh summer place in Maine, only to return (after accidentally torching the place) for an LA meeting with movie execs interested in one of his scripts (an unlikely development, given the perhaps intentionally funny summaries of them Hond provides), then a final, risibly bittersweet Moment of Bonding with The New Arrival. It’s probably a credit to Hond’s sense of humor (if not shame) that, having concocted this blithely ridiculous plot, he doesn't know how to develop it. Only in the increasingly rare moments when Moss’s hangdog, everybody-hates-me humor threatens to turn him into a credible character does this novel—despite its thudding emphasis on conception and birth—come to life.
A mistake that Hond really ought to have aborted.Pub Date: April 12, 2005
ISBN: 0-375-50805-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2005
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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