Whimsical, bittersweet debut about a quixotic 1934 road trip to the Chicago World's Fair, recalled by a curmudgeonly retiree who learns of love and loss when the adventure turns sour. Hoping to glimpse the wonders of the modern era and lose their virginity in a Chicago brothel, Ace Gilbert and Will Randall, two fatherless 18-year-old buddies, take off from Bennett's Corners, Ohio (``a place where six roads come together like slices in a pie''), in a Model T equipped with faux airplane wings and a propeller mounted on the radiator. In the backseat is Will's younger brother, Clyde, a last-minute addition suffering from an earache. Gilbert, the narrator, is the son of a WW I fighter pilot and imagines himself soaring above the flat, forlorn landscape of the Depression-era Middle West until the trio meets up with the smartly dressed, shotgun-toting highway- robber Gus Gillis and his comely moll, Gladys Bartholomew. Gus is obsessed with the legend of recently murdered Texas highwayman Clyde Barrow (of Bonnie and Clyde fame) and has set off on his own comically inept journey into crime, hoping to achieve immortality by dying in a hail of bullets while Gladys trusts that her as yet unlaunched career as a radio star will benefit from Gus's nascent notoriety. Gus hijacks a crop duster, and, with Gilbert piloting and Clyde cringing in the back, departs on an aerial crime spree, leaving Will with sexy Gladys. Things get nasty when the gang takes over a radio station and Gus grabs a microphone to bait corrupt Sheriff Orville Barnes to come after him. Barnes and FBI slime Norman Pruitt exploit Gus's misguided lust for fame, turning what began as reckless adolescent irreverence into a violent nightmare that leaves one of the boys dead. Abruptly shifting passages of featherweight cuteness, wistful nostalgia, and foreboding disaster make for a bumpy flight, but Levandoski's search for meaning in meaningless tragedy is heartfelt.
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1997
ISBN: 1-877946-98-2
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Permanent Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 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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