by P.W. Walters ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 3, 2019
A psychologically acute but long-winded tale of trauma and redemption.
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A Utah boy who survives horrific child sexual abuse fails to put it behind him as he matures into a brilliant, caustic, verbose teenager in this debut coming-of-age novel.
Growing up in Salt Lake City in the 1960s and ’70s, Owen Langley’s life is a Dickensian nightmare. The offspring of his mother’s rape by a stranger, the 5-year-old Owen is beaten and starved by his mom and her husband. After they commit suicide, Owen falls into the clutches of a ghoulish foster couple and is kept in the basement and regularly raped by the husband. An intervention and another suicide later, he’s adopted by the kindly James and Jean Crowley. But when James drops dead and Jean enters a mental institution, Owen winds up in the custody of the couple’s housekeeper, Mrs. Windom, who locks him in the basement for two weeks on a shredded wheat–and-water diet. First grade is a further ordeal of bullying and ostracism that’s worsened by Owen’s bookishness and Victorian rhetoric. (How a 6-year-old Utah kid learned to say “I won’t let you soil my parents’ good name” isn’t explored.) The sprawling tale then skips ahead to ninth grade, when Owen’s toffish grandiloquence effloresces. At one point, he tells a school bully: “You have not changed any over the summer, Wayne….Rather like a tedious ostinato, aren’t you? Or a birth defect—tiresome, monotonous, ineradicable.” The high school girls love that talk, and Owen is soon going steady with queen bee Roxanne Solleveld, whose family has its own backstory of molestation, murder, and suicide. Owen’s implausible maturity and thoughtfulness make him a big man on campus whom students and teachers alike turn to for counseling. Alas, his humane acceptance of gay students runs afoul of homophobic bullies, leading to yet more sexual assault and suicide. Walters’ melodrama and his prose style are dominated by Owen’s voice, which energizes the ambitious novel. He’s a complex, magnetic character, and the author skillfully dissects Owen’s inner turmoil as he deploys his arrogant intellect to cover up his insecurities and ward off the emotional connections he fears and craves. Unfortunately, 654 pages of the protagonist’s bombast, know-it-all-ism, and speechifying start to suck the air out of the story—one funeral oration drones on for four pages—especially because his incessant Wilde-an snark lacks Wilde’s wit. The result is a hero whom readers may not care about.
A psychologically acute but long-winded tale of trauma and redemption.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-64228-032-6
Page Count: 668
Publisher: Izzard Ink
Review Posted Online: Feb. 6, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951
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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SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2006
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
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