Klass plays it too safe here, with wise cracks and glib feel-good moments replacing real drama and self-exploration.
Pediatrician Klass (The Mystery of Breathing, 2004, etc.) offers a mild, episodic novel about a tough but warmhearted pediatrician whose life as a doctor, wife and mother is informed by her own childhood in foster care.
Lucy and her English professor husband Greg are the doting suburban parents of socially astute ten-year-old Isabel and intellectually brilliant but socially awkward six-year-old Freddy. Lucy is fiercely protective of her children, particularly sensitive Freddy. But when she’s not driving Lucy to soccer or Freddy to birthday parties, she is running a clinic in Boston treating poor, neglected and abused children, many placed in foster care. Raised in the foster system herself until a favorite English teacher adopted her, Lucy strongly identifies with her patients and has difficulty separating her family life from her work. Instead of an evolving plot, there are slice-of-Lucy’s life incidents. Traveling to California to give a medical lecture, she becomes entangled with a 12-year-old boy whose braininess reminds her of Freddy and whose neglectful father reminds her that wealth does not ensure good parenting. On a family beach vacation, she obsesses about a news story concerning murdered kids in Boston. At her children’s private school, of which she is often wittily if self-righteously disdaining, a parent asks Lucy’s help in blocking a supposedly bogus abuse charge. A charming but irresponsible mother abandons her children at Lucy’s clinic, then briefly steals them back before willingly relinquishing them for good with Lucy’s guidance. Greg confesses a brief infidelity, only making the bonds of his marriage to Lucy stronger. Similarly, although Isabel gets mildly annoyed with Lucy at times, she and gentle genius Freddy prove to be the supersmart, superloving kids other parents don’t want to hear bragged about. Lucy, sometimes likable if overbearing, is a bit too perfect to connect to readers.
Klass plays it too safe here, with wise cracks and glib feel-good moments replacing real drama and self-exploration.Pub Date: July 7, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-618-55596-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2008
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
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BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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