Installment number two in a proposed annual series of paired collections featuring gay and lesbian writers (see Hers, p. 811). The 18 pieces compiled here run an unpredictable gamut, from quietly desperate gay coming-of-age tales (``Tar Pit Heart,'' by Tim Miller) to oddly subversive science-fiction yarns ( Frank DiPalmero's ``The Option of the Coat''). According to the editors, the primary criterion for inclusion was literary quality, and while that's a hopelessly ambiguous way of evaluating the offerings, the best stories are indeed very good. Mark Shaw's ``Queerbait,'' for instance, finds a couple of midwestern gays lose in a punk-rock, tough-talking demimonde that's part Christopher Isherwood, part Dennis Cooper. In Bernard Cooper's ``Arson,'' a morally troubled young teenager decides to expunge his guilt by torching his porn in his parents' garage, only to have the burnt fragments of his illicit desire drift into hidden corners. ``To Nam and Bac,'' by Henri Tran, conflates queer issues with colonial anxieties by locating its narrative in preFall of Saigon Vietnam. ``The Road to Mary's Place,'' from David Kelly, finds a cosmopolitan gay man on a visit to his hometown; he's forced to save a hustler he has recently tricked with from the kid's redneck homophobe brothers. But Jason Friedman's ``The Wedding Dress'' is the anthology's standout: a carefully delivered contemporary southern story, reminiscent of Madison Smartt Bell, in which a teenager finds a wedding dress, briefly becomes a local celebrity, and gets spirited off by the dress's male owner, who gives him his first awkward taste of sex. Not all of the pieces strive to explore explicitly queer themes, and some of the less successful ones struggle to get going: Rick Sandford's ``Levi,'' for all its good intentions, reads like creepy pedantry, and Patrick Gale's ``Wig'' suffers from a damagingly self-conscious diction. Not uniformly brilliant, but in places luminous.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-571-19866-X
Page Count: 242
Publisher: Faber & Faber/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1995
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
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