A spooky, surreal ghost story that’s elevated by its humanity.
In this literary ghost story/psychological thriller, a woman is forced to confront her past when sticks begin appearing out of thin air.
“There was another stick,” begins this novel, words that sound simple—but the reality is terrifying to Barbara. Until recently, she was living a dull but settled life. But then Nothing began to produce broom handle–sized sticks from Nowhere right in her apartment. She can find no rational explanation for them or for the other strange things and people (a muscular black woman, a little girl with long braids) she begins to see and sense. The sticks keep coming, and so does Barbara’s dead father. Divining that he wants her to investigate his supposed suicide, she returns to her hometown. Her mother and brother still live there, the brother believing his bunker mates from Vietnam, which he left four years ago, are still present and speaking to him. The family’s undercurrents are disturbing: Barbara’s mother beat her children and is still controlling and abusive, while her father “was witty and likable to outsiders…but he was cruelly cynical at home.” As Barbara investigates his death, her brother plans, crazily, to kill her. She suffers great personal and psychological danger, finding nevertheless at the end of her ordeal that there is untapped potential within herself. In her debut novel, Greene orchestrates Barbara’s increasing horror well, raising the pitch with each new strange encounter while deepening the sense of dread. For example, an early remark, “Barbara’s relationship with her father became as intimate as it had been in childhood,” takes on sinister meaning as the novel develops. The plot is dark and gets darker, but at the same time, Greene threads subtle notes of possible connection throughout: the black woman sneers but offers advice and help; the child tells her “I can help you find love.” Moments of sly humor leaven the novel as well. Satisfyingly, the place Barbara gets to is as hard-won as any explorer’s mountaintop or ocean depth. Barbara earns it, and so does Greene.
A spooky, surreal ghost story that’s elevated by its humanity.Pub Date: May 24, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5431-5326-2
Page Count: 199
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 13, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2017
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
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