A talky tract that's less historical novel than deadly earnest brief for the previously unheralded notion that the settlement of America's Middle Colonies owed much to a sort of psychic friends network. In 1710, teenager Conrad Weiser comes to the New World with the Germans who were recruited by England's Queen Anne to populate the desolate province of New York. The refugees from Europe's seemingly endless wars and religious conflicts quickly find themselves oppressed anew, this time by deceitful, avaricious agents of the Crown. Conrad's father Johann soon sends him to live among the Mohawks. A gifted linguist, the pioneering exchange student takes quickly to Indian ways; perceived as an `old soul' by his hosts (whose younger generation is losing touch with the spirits, great or otherwise, as white men overrun their ancestral domain), he's apprenticed to the shaman Longhair, who tutors him in the fine art of dreaming. An apt pupil, Conrad engages in many out- of-body experiences. When not larking with hawks or eagles, he conjures up the site where Captain Kidd buried treasure on Martha's Vineyard. Journeying there in corporeal form, he retrieves gold and jewelry enough to buy his fellow Germans their own land. While he's prepared to continue his visionary studies with the Real People (as Moss's Indians style themselves), Longhair instead sends him home to serve as a bridge between whites and reds. Conrad marries, starts a family, and eventually leads the Germans into the Pennsylvania wilderness, where (with guidance from a supreme being, the Peacemaker, and his avatar Hiawatha) the group establishes a prosperous farming community. Bad medicine from the usually diverting Moss (The Firekeeper, 1995, etc.), made no easier to swallow by constant prattle about body thieves, death hammers, dreambodies, lifegivers, shapeshifting, soul takers, and timefolders, not to mention the odd anachronism (``She is an arendiwanen, a woman of power. That's something you don't mess with'').
Pub Date: March 25, 1997
ISBN: 0-312-85739-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 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
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