For 18 years, starting in 1963 when he became Master of the U. of Toronto's Massey College, veteran novelist Davies told an original "cheerful ghost story" at the college's annual Christmas party. Here, then, "in the form in which they were first spoken aloud," are those 18 tongue-in-cheek whimsies—complete with campus allusions (meaningless to outsiders), references to Canadian history, and academic/literary humor of a more universal sort too. "The Ghost Who Vanished By Degrees" is the shade of a graduate-student suicide who "was ploughed on his Ph.D. oral"; he returns, demanding that Davies examine him again for that precious degree. (His thesis, alas, is Prologema to the Study of the Christ Symbol in the Plays of Thomas Egerton Wilks.) Elsewhere, Davies is haunted by Queen Victoria, various kings and prime ministers, the Devil himself (who chortles over having invented Christmas cards, gift-giving, and Santa Claus), a foul-mouth 18th-century complainer, Albert Einstein, and Little Lord Fauntleroy. A female spirit arrives to do campus battle against the Ugly Spectre of Sexism. There's a Frankenstein send-up, with a mad scientist manufacturing an ideal Massey College cat in the laboratory. And, most amusingly, Davies receives visitations from a possessed antique table that fondles him ("Ghosts I can cope with, but erotic furniture destroys my self-possession"). . . and from a Ph.D. candidate who has gone 'round the Dickens bend: "Tubfast Weatherwax III thought he was Little Nell." Despite all the in-jokes and donnish asides: spry, inventive, modestly amusing parodies for fanciers of senior-common-room giddiness.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1983
ISBN: 0142002461
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1983
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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