This novel reads dangerously like Donna Tartt lite.
An Ivy League senior’s unsolved murder may or may not involve, but certainly affects, three students and the charismatic professor authorities suspect but never charge with the crime.
Kirman's debut novel closely parallels the 1998 Suzanne Jovin murder case, in which a Yale professor fell under suspicion but was never charged. The professor here is Rufus Storrow, a Virginia aristocrat and graduate of West Point and Oxford. In his 40s, he's teaching law and history at Harvard after a mysterious career in shadowy government agencies abroad. The murder victim is Julie Patel, one of his students, who vociferously opposed Storrow’s less-than-politically-correct views on colonialism and the Third World. Three of Julie's classmates, Georgia Calvin, Charlie Flournoy, and Alice Kovac, all have different relationships with Storrow. Their recollections and perceptions of events leading up to Julie's murder and its aftermath form the novel’s core. Georgia was Storrow’s secret lover—who seduced whom remains unclear—but dumped him before the murder. The beautiful, privileged, seemingly worldly daughter of a famous photographer, she's careless in her affections though not as tough as she thinks. Charlie is pathetically smitten with Georgia, allowing her to tease him sexually and use him as a doormat. He's rejected his working-class family and re-created himself as a bow tie–wearing, politically conservative elitist; he idolizes Storrow, his mentor, for the very reasons students like Julie hate him. Georgia’s friend Alice, the daughter of Serbian immigrants, is an angry outsider and an emotional loose cannon. There's a definite homoerotic undercurrent to the girls’ friendship. Georgia is attracted to Alice’s intensity; though Alice wants to “share in that attention which Georgia inspired, to harness that power,” she also blames Georgia for her eventual emotional breakdown. While Storrow and the three students all have guilty secrets to hide, the murder affects each differently in the decade that follows.
This novel reads dangerously like Donna Tartt lite.Pub Date: July 7, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8041-3931-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: April 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2015
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
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