Parrish puts his Joshua Rabb series (Nothing But the Truth, 1995, etc.) on hold for an equally stolid two-act legal melodrama tracing the fallout from a most heinous rape. Act One begins when lace-curtain Boston transplant Mary Kate O'Dwyer takes 16-year-old working girl Donna Alvarez into her home in Scottsdale, planning to adopt her legally. Before the final papers can be filed, Donna's former pimp tracks her down in Arizona and peddles her to sex-starved lawyer Philip Wilkott and his rough-trade lover Grant Felsen, who break into Kate's house and rape both Donna and Kate's three-year-old daughter Jennifer. When preliminary tests indicate that Wilkott's infected Jennifer with the AIDS virus, Kate's boyfriend goes wild, beating Wilkott's name out of the pimp. DNA testing proves that Wilkott was the rapist, but Wilkott's well-connected father gets the case thrown out on a technicality. These early scenes, though marred by nonstop preaching and some intolerable dialogue, work hard to whip up sympathy for the decent heroes, whose thirst for justice is thwarted at every turn by the law. It's in Act Two, which begins when Kate decides to take the law into her hands by killing Wilkott, that things go wrong, and not just for Kate. Kate's plans don't pan out exactly as she'd hoped (Parrish inexplicably throws away his biggest scene here); Wilkott Sr. presses for her prosecution anyway; and suddenly everybody in the legal system who'd been ganging up on her before turns a smiling face to her. The irredeemable villains place themselves beyond the pale by their racist, anti-Semitic, anti-feminist slurs, and the potentially explosive legal debate trails off in a series of skirmishes that show justice rousingly if not very convincingly triumphing over the law. There'll even be reprieves for Donna and Jennifer, as if tenderhearted Parrish couldn't bear to take leave of Scottsdale without righting every wrong. Like-minded readers will lap it all up.
Pub Date: July 31, 1996
ISBN: 0-525-94161-4
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1996
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
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