Riding high on the widespread raves for his delightful debut, Madeleine's Ghost (1995), Girardi offers up a tale of modern pirates and the slave trade that isn't without its charms, though falling well short of the mark left by its predecessor. Wilson Lander is caught in a double bind: Not only does he find his brokerage job unfulfilling, but he also lives with a constant fear of imminent disaster (born from watching helplessly as a child while his mother died in a freak accident). When the copper-haired Cricket enters his life, seducing him and then tempting him to sign on as a cook for a world cruise on a billionaire's state-of-the-art yacht, Wilson goes along with her, dumping his long-term girlfriend (who's also his boss) via a phone call. Cricket proves to be a proverbial siren, however, when pirates capture the yacht off the coast of Africa and the pirate captain turns out to be her father. She saves Wilson from a walk on the plank by claiming him as her prize, then, against Daddy's wishes, persuades him to marry her by making him believe that only he can save her from a life of piracy and ill-gotten gain. But when she proposes that they go on a few more slaving ventures, to build up a nest egg that will allow them to retire comfortably in Paris, Wilson balks, ultimately ruining a highly lucrative mission involving Pygmy women by setting them free and killing Cricket's father. Captured by the slavers and abandoned by Cricket, he escapes with the help of unlikely allies, who aid him in the utter destruction of the pirate base, allowing him to return to his former life (and girlfriend) with his conscience clean. Colorful scenes and romantic themes ensure a number of appealing moments, but, unfortunately, the implausibilities of this good-man-vs.-evil-empire saga undermine any sustained impact. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-385-31485-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1996
A presold prefab blockbuster, what with King's Carrie hitting the moviehouses, Salem's Lot being lensed, The Shining itself sold to Warner Bros. and tapped as a Literary Guild full selection, NAL paperback, etc. (enough activity to demand an afterlife to consummate it all).
The setting is The Overlook, a palatial resort on a Colorado mountain top, snowbound and closed down for the long, long winter. Jack Torrance, a booze-fighting English teacher with a history of violence, is hired as caretaker and, hoping to finish a five-act tragedy he's writing, brings his wife Wendy and small son Danny to the howling loneliness of the half-alive and mad palazzo. The Overlook has a gruesome past, scenes from which start popping into the present in various suites and the ballroom. At first only Danny, gifted with second sight (he's a "shiner"), can see them; then the whole family is being zapped by satanic forces. The reader needs no supersight to glimpse where the story's going as King's formula builds to a hotel reeling with horrors during Poesque New Year's Eve revelry and confetti outta nowhere....
Back-prickling indeed despite the reader's unwillingness at being mercilessly manipulated.
Pub Date: Jan. 28, 1976
ISBN: 0385121679
Page Count: 453
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1976
PERSPECTIVES
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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