Cohen (The Here and Now, 1996) takes a few feeble pokes at the collusion between universities and international drug...
An insomniac single mother seeks relief—and (temporarily) finds chemically induced bliss.
It’s no wonder Bonnie Saks can’t sleep. She’s a poorly paid college instructor, working doggedly on her dissertation while teaching Western Lit. to drowsy undergrads. She’s beset by a vague longing for a better life, overwhelmed by feelings of failure, and worried about her unintended pregnancy. Her married lover means well but does little, and her do-gooder husband decamped some time ago to the Third World in pursuit of a less materialistic way of life. Their teenaged son Alex is a nervous wreck, subsisting on Prozac and Dr. Pepper, and her younger son, longing for his feckless father, keeps her awake with nightmares of his own. So Bonnie answers an ad for sleep-study volunteers placed by Dr. Ian Ogelvie, a hotshot young psychiatrist who’s testing the fabulous new sleeping pill Dodabulax. He spends long hours each night at the lab obsessing over trifles, fantasizing about the fat grant he hopes to earn, lusting after his nubile, tough-talking lab assistant Marisa Chu, and swilling vodka straight from the bottle. Hooking up Bonnie to an electroencephalograph and sending her into dreamland with a few blue pills, he watches her sink into untroubled slumber at last. Her dreams are restful and deeply pleasurable—and often erotic. But when she wakes up, everything is just like before. Bonnie gets on wearily with her life, learns that the fetus has died (and that those blue pills were placebos); and Dr. Ogelvie learns that he won’t get that coveted grant after all.
Cohen (The Here and Now, 1996) takes a few feeble pokes at the collusion between universities and international drug companies bent on getting their latest products past the FDA, but that’s about it for excitement. Any intermittent flights of fancy are shot down by the cerebral, fussy prose.Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2001
ISBN: 0-684-85079-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2000
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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