An ambitious, absorbing saga of family and community relations, set in present-day New Mexico, from the author of the well-received Mystery Ride (1993), etc.. The town of Persimmon, which lies just across the Rio Grande from the Mexican-American colonia of Apura, is inhabited by such harmlessly distracted souls as 30ish Gay Schaefer and her adolescent daughter Rita; Gay's cousin Heart, a remote woman who's a recovering cancer patient; and Denny Redmon, the high-school basketball coach Gay dallies with—and strings along—while living apart from the husband whom she's never divorced and with whom she has frequently reunited. Apura houses more desperate and dangerous people, such as 19-year-old Rudy Salazar, a powder keg whose anger and resentment over his culture's second-class status will flame out and touch the Schaefers—and also the family of Enrique ``Henry'' Calzado, who've moved ``up'' to Persimmon. Boswell creates a vivid and disturbing picture of a society tested by the pressures of assimilation, in which the proud declaration that properties and businesses are exclusively ``American owned'' makes it painfully clear to the malcontent Rudy that ``most of the world operated at a distance and in a language he did not know.'' The novel is generously, if a trifle mechanically, plotted and noteworthy for the compassion and insight that Boswell extends to virtually all his characters. He writes exquisite and arousing sex scenes, and knows exactly how high-school kids swagger and banter. As convincing as his confused and self-conscious adults are, Boswell excels at portraying adolescents: both Enrique's efforts to Americanize himself (he adores River Phoenix and My Own Private Idaho) and Rita's passage through sexual humiliation and violence to ``purity'' are presented with lucid straightforwardness and sympathetic understanding. Splendid work, from a novelist who keeps getting better and better.
Pub Date: April 2, 1997
ISBN: 0-679-43251-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1997
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
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