A sophisticated, satisfying treat.
A grand, ambitious debut, set in the elegantly volatile world of professional ballet.
At 16, Jean-Baptiste St. Michel is almost finished as a classical dancer. His teachers have lost faith in him—and he’s given up on himself—but one aged prima donna sees promise in the awkward, beautiful boy. She whisks him away from the Académie in Paris, gives him a place in her small English ballet company and turns him over to a daring, mercurial and brilliant choreographer. Years of total dedication and unrelenting work transform Michel into a star. Jonni Kendal is a fledgling actress, in London for her first professional role, but her interest in her career fades when she meets Michel. It takes just one night for her to become completely captivated by this gorgeous, graceful and serenely confident young man and his beguiling circle of friends. As for Michel, he’s quite taken with Jonni’s sweet face and generous backside, but he saves all his emotion for the stage. The evolution of this tragically flawed relationship is just one facet of Horsfall’s epic first novel. This big, rich, romantic saga, peopled with a full cast of appealing characters, and their complex, compelling stories, are allowed to develop over the course of several years. Comparisons to Barbara Taylor Bradford and Maeve Binchy are easy, but Horsfall has her own style and her own sensibility. Although she gives her audience plenty of sentimentality and spectacle, she writes with a cool, dry—occasionally wry—voice that’s the perfect complement to her combustible subjects. The narrative sparkles with love and lust and intrigue and betrayals and breakdowns, but the drama never seems contrived; instead, it’s just a natural by-product of ballet, the inevitable outpouring of devoted young artists working and living together in a rarefied, insulated and high-pressure world. Horsfall is also able to relate a great deal of information about dance without ever becoming didactic, which makes her book as edifying as it is entertaining.
A sophisticated, satisfying treat.Pub Date: Aug. 30, 2005
ISBN: 0-345-47978-5
Page Count: 800
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2005
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
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