Conventional debut about a schizophrenic who almost topples friends, lovers, and family. Visiting her boyfriend Paul in Seattle (should she really give up her home in D.C. and move in with him?), magazine writer Marsha Rose is shocked when she glances from Paul’s apartment window and spies her childhood friend Jody below. A stranger to him since the onset of his schizophrenia ten years before, Marsha rushes down to discover a Jody who is only semi-lucid. As if mimicking Jody’s confusion, Marsha’s narrative splits in two, one half taking a linear path that returns her and Jody to their childhood home in South Carolina, the other remembering Jody as the attractive, healthy boy he once was. The isolation of growing up Jewish in a small southern town is what once had served to bring Marsha and Jody together. But after Jody became ill (and Marsha blamed herself for it), all she came to be left with are memories and random anecdotes of his mental disarray. After his brief stay in a Seattle hospital for cutting himself while under her care, it becomes Marsha’s melancholy job to take him back to South Carolina, probably to life in an institution. The trip also gives her an excuse to separate from Paul, now grown wary of her entanglement with Jody. Once he’s home and back on medication, Jody’s mind clarifies, as does Marsha’s when she begins to reconsider the state of her family: her parents— disgruntled marriage, the atrophy of her hometown, the prosaic lives of those she left behind. But her cathartic journey north (she resolves to move in with Paul; Jody is able to live on his own) seems more literary than emotional as Coburn emphasizes the clinical over the human aspect of mental illness, ultimately distancing the reader. Competent, but curiously little emotion comes through in spite of the subject at hand.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-7867-0566-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1998
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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