Stalwart sermon-stories on living right, possessing along the way the delicacy of songbirds.
Like planets in orbit, five morality plays circle an emblematic sidewalk inscription.
A sidewalk is being laid at the start of McLaughlin’s novel in five parts, with interludes. After the workman leaves and as the concrete sets, a young girl approaches, stick in hand. Iris carves her father’s and mother’s names in the wet concrete, then her own, then the words “Please, God, bring Dad home safely.” The year is 1918; Dad is in the Argonne Forest, getting gassed, and prayers are not unwelcome. Back on the home front, Iris, her mother and several like-minded women are engaged in the suffrage movement, poking racism in the eye and drawing some wrong conclusions about the boyfriend of one in their company. Each of the five stories in this work will have a strong lunar attraction to the sidewalk inscription, pushing characters toward it, then pulling them away like the tide to get on with their lives. The main characters are all women: One will be young and questing, others will be counselors, old souls and forces of nature. They tender sage advice. Ethel notes that “[f]or most people, hate seems to come more easily than love”; when the mother of a polio sufferer expresses reluctance in her daughter going to college, not wanting to rush into anything, her teacher fires back, “But we don’t want to rush her away from anything either, do we?”; then there’s Aunt Rhoda, who tells her niece that two years of grief over her father is enough: “He’d want ya to give ’im a thought now an’ then, but he’d tell ya to get your herd to Abilene.” The stories are skeletal and unpretentious; to call them parables would be too ornate, but homilies is not far off the mark, though not admonitory. They simply express the timelessness of desires and needs, and the beauty of forgiveness and second chances, mercy and service, backbone and independence of thought, especially against the flow of received opinion.
Stalwart sermon-stories on living right, possessing along the way the delicacy of songbirds.Pub Date: April 23, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-4257-5022-0
Page Count: 138
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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