A fine debut by a talented writer.
Lost souls pedaling through post-modern America try fitfully to connect in this bleakly engrossing novel.
Leading the caravan is Duke Dalton, retired CEO of a motivational audio-tape company and founder of a nonprofit called Caregivers for Humanity. A charismatic font of crackpot inspirational homilies, he assembles a group of feckless 20-somethings for a summer bike tour of desultory do-gooding–making sandwiches for the homeless, cleaning up housing-project lawns, taking kids to the zoo. Duke’s hangers-on include Toby, a born-again Christian chef uneasy about his engagement to Penny, a smart but aimless woman who insists she loved all 13 of her previous “penetration partners”; Danny, a good-hearted gay man looking for redemption; Lewis, a self-consciously detached artist who sculpts papier-mache women while coldly fending off attachments to the real version; and Toby’s half-brother Mills, an emotionally numb, half-Vietnamese physicist who briefly joins the group during a sojourn in pre-Katrina New Orleans. The loosely structured story only sporadically brings these characters into contact; they spend most of their time brooding over their backstories. The men are most afflicted: Laboring under masculine stereotypes that enjoin on them a “rage and filth and dangerousness” they can’t live up to, they feel belittled and bruised by demanding, sexually cavalier women. Their self-pity licenses a compensatory callousness, as when Lewis shrugs off a pregnant girlfriend with an offer of $300 per month in exchange for weekend visitation rights. Peters employs a lean, deadpan prose style, full of evocative, off-hand imagery and a precise, ironic rendering of contemporary clichés. He captures the mind-set of wary, isolated, particularly male singletons, mordantly aware of the emptiness of their lives yet leery of anything that might fill the void.
A fine debut by a talented writer.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 1936
ISBN: 978-0-9719382-7-4
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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