by Rima Jbara ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006
Readers will find this story as empty as its heroine.
A vain, self-obsessed woman toggles between morose navel-gazing and showy breakdowns in this dreary character study.
She’s 17, beautiful, and already briskly selling her paintings in galleries, but all is not idyllic in young Hope’s life. She has issues stemming from her father’s suicide when she was an infant. Then her mother drops dead and her boyfriend dumps her, and the resulting sleeping-pill habit segues into her first overdose. Hope’s main problem, though, is her raging narcissism. She vows to become a legendary painter who will “live forever in people’s minds,” writes a poem titled “I Just Want to Be Perfect,” and drops grandiose proclamations like “I belong to history” into everyday conversation. History duly embraces Hope as she becomes a famous artist who holds packed press conferences at every opening, yet happiness eludes her. Marriage to Jean-Luc, a much older gallery owner, gratifies her daddy complex but yields more pill-induced overdoses and miscarriages. Vaguely but eternally dissatisfied, Hope mopes in prose (“I feel bored with everything around me...there’s an emptiness in my heart”) and verse (“With all my strength / I’m perfectly sick / of this life”) The only thing that interests her is herself, a subject she explores in inner dialogues (i.e. “I’m not crazy.” “You are.” “I’m not.”) that go on for pages while poor Jean-Luc begs her to get out of the tub and come to dinner. The author is likewise infatuated with her protagonist’s soul; other characters exist only to praise Hope’s beauty and brilliance and take her to the emergency room to have her stomach pumped. Alas, neither Jbara’s lifeless prose nor her awkward poetry sparks much interest in Hope’s travails, or in her defiant egotism and oft-trumpeted artistic genius–which is further cast into doubt by her apartment’s all-purple color scheme.
Readers will find this story as empty as its heroine.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 978-1-4259-1900-6
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 20, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2006
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
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by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951
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
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