A family drama made unmanageable by disparate plot threads.
Life is hazardous for a newly institutionalized mother and her risk-taking financier daughter in this contrived novel by Mason (Us, 2004, etc.).
Eloise McAllister loves her elderly mother Joan, up to a point. That point is reached when Joan becomes too frail to live alone. Rather than having her mother move in with her, Eloise installs Joan in the Albany, an expensive South London nursing home. As a sweetener she pays for a vacation to South Africa, the place Joan left years before to study music in London. Joan wants to investigate her Boer heritage and is thrilled to find the diary of her grandmother, a survivor of a British concentration camp set up during the Anglo-Boer War. Back in London, she hates the Albany and Sister Karen, the smarmy disciplinarian who runs it. Eloise has problems of her own. She makes a good living as a hedge-fund broker in metallurgical commodities and has bet heavily on osmium, based on encouraging predictions by her former lover, the brilliant French physicist Claude Pasquier. But a scientific article has cast doubt on osmium’s industrial applications, and the price is tanking. Eloise’s job is on the line. What if she can’t pay the Albany’s bills? Joan is not helping. Her innocent hallucinations of piano pedals have progressed to full-scale delusions involving a sadistic concentration-camp doctor. Also in the mix are Joan’s dead husband and mother-in-law (she hated them both); Eloise’s black-sheep brother, fresh from Australia; and Pasquier, Eloise’s lover again after his marriage to an American collapses. Mason’s lack of control over his material is compounded by his ambivalence toward Eloise, one moment the hard businesswoman, the next the fundamentally decent daughter.
A family drama made unmanageable by disparate plot threads.Pub Date: March 19, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-307-26746-7
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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