Wry and pitch-black send-up of media hubris.
A newspaper editor loathed by most people in the civilized world gets his comeuppance.
Second-novelist Chalmers (Who’s Who in Hell, 2002) isn’t so much interested this time around with the ink-stained wretches of Fleet Street but instead starts at the top—before taking a nosedive into the real world. Edward Miller runs a London tabloid of the sort owned by Rupert Murdoch, a paper regularly taking swipes at immigrants and gays when not providing salacious details about celebrities and politicians. A self-satisfied fat cat, penny-pinching hypocrite, and serial philanderer, Ed starts off a workday—his wedding anniversary, actually—with a quickie in the office storeroom, and things go quickly downhill from there. By the next morning, Ed will be alone in his house (his wife off shagging the next-door neighbor), dressed only in a urine-soaked towel, doing lines of cocaine while an inquisitive reporter from a rival—liberal—paper asks him about his racial attitudes and why he spray-painted “WANNKER” [sic] on his neighbor’s car. With the press, police, and lawyers closing in, Ed shaves his head and, on the advice of an old schoolmate (who oddly doesn’t hate him), jets off to Barcelona to work as an instructor for an ESL school that regularly hires educated drifters, no questions asked. For a time, Chalmers seems to have tapped into a real goldmine with his cast of disaffected expats, all on the run from something they’d rather not talk about and slowly bonding with this odd newcomer, who looks nothing like the incriminating photos still splashed all over the papers. But author Chalmers, perhaps not realizing what a good thing he has going and wishing to punish Ed further, sends him on the run again, straight into a rather painful subplot at a Florida freakshow. Things wrap up quite nicely, even if the final fourth is a bit of a waste.
Wry and pitch-black send-up of media hubris.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-8021-4160-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Black Cat/Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2004
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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