This capably understated portrayal of a veteran soldier's singular postwar adventure is the first novel from a respected military historian (The Vacant Chair, 1993, etc.). The protagonist, identified only as ``the colonel,'' is a former Nazi tank commander and prisoner of war, retired and working intermittently as a translator, living with his wife in quiet anonymity in a small German village, many years after his country's surrender. When an American film company shooting an ``epic'' movie about the war asks him to serve as a consultant, his curiosity and his vanity drive him to join the crew on location in a neighboring country (apparently Italy), where the colonel endures casual affronts to his practiced dignity, and variously upsetting relationships with the film's forthright woman director, the egocentric actor who'll play him, the actor's awkwardly maturing son (who's enthralled by the colonel's military expertise), and the seductive actress playing his wife (who seems enamored of the man the colonel once was). As the fictional story he's watching blends in his mind with long-buried memories of combat experience, the colonel realizes ruefully that ``his life then had a richness it lacked forever after'' and that he too has been an actor—``in a play with unfortunate consequences, a mental strutting and posing that created bombed-out cities and tossed broken corpses into ugly arrangements.'' Mitchell succumbs to overplotting along the way, but brings his story to a highly effective climax and denouement, ending it with a dramatic flourish that curiously recalls a recent novel rather similar in theme and tone as well: Brian Moore's The Statement. Though it's not a fully realized work of fiction, this is a thoughtful, lucidly written character study and moral drama that augurs well for its author's new career as a novelist.
Pub Date: June 1, 1997
ISBN: 1-885983-11-5
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Turtle Point
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1997
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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