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
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
