In 1973, a decaying suburban Connecticut family has a bad day. Father Benjamin Hood is a middle-aged alcoholic, tormented by canker sores, in danger of losing his job as a media and entertainment expert for a high-end brokerage house, and having an affair with a neighbor named Janey. His wife, Elena, is cold and distant, even though she gets a kick reading about impotence in Masters and Johnson and believes herself ``capable of abandon.'' Fourteen-year-old Wendy Hood's raging hormones and desire to break out lead to dry humping in basements and graveyards and a daring public display with a girlfriend at a slumber party. Older brother Paul, relegated to boarding school, gets stoned and compulsively follows the comic book capers of the Fantastic Four. On this fateful day, Janey disappears in the middle of her afternoon rendezvous with Benjamin to do some shopping; Benjamin catches Wendy and Janey's son Mike going at it; Elena confronts Benjamin about his infidelity; Benjamin and Elena find themselves at a neighborhood key party (a '60s tradition that migrated belatedly to suburbia whereby men toss their keys in a bowl at the beginning of the night and at the end of the night the women randomly select a set and go off with its owner); Janey purposely shies away from the Hood key ring; Benjamin passes out on the bathroom floor; Elena goes off with Janey's husband; Wendy wanders over to Mike's house and seduces his younger brother Sandy because Mike isn't around; Paul makes an unsuccessful play for the woman of his dreams with alcohol and drugs; and matters only get worse because a vicious northeaster rages outside. Moody (Garden State, 1992) masterfully captures suburban angst through lucid detail. But his characters lack substance so that we don't care what happens to them, and in the end, it seems, neither do they. Too cold.
Pub Date: May 4, 1994
ISBN: 0-316-57921-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1994
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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