With a title like this, you get your money’s worth.
A gently amusing debut for the Reformed set follows the financial vicissitudes of a psychic in Great Neck, Long Island, struggling to make her calling respectable among the suburban well-heeled.
Miriam Kaminsky, married to adoring Queens pharmacist Rory, was instructed by her Russian babushka grandmother, from whom she inherited her psychic gift, never to sell it for gelt. Yet Rory’s business is floundering (he’s being swindled by an employee he won’t fire) and Miriam’s is flush—if only she’d expand her phone readings into a hot new business and appear on TV. The problem is teenaged daughter Cara, a very serious high-school senior who’d had her cap set on Cornell until she fell for the local rich greaser, Lance Stark, who rides a motorcycle and sports a shaved head. Miriam would rather remain anonymous, in order to shield Cara from the social opprobrium that accompanies psychics’ work (Cara herself has been disapproving of her mother’s psychic gift ever since she recognized, as a young girl, that she didn’t inherit it). There isn’t much we can’t predict here, but Miriam is so winningly philanthropic, without an axe to grind or argument to prove, with her unmanageable red hair and dowdy wardrobe, that she proves refreshingly disarming. She can recognize sadness or loneliness by a person’s blue aura, and she regularly summons the spirits of her “healer,” Bubbie, who counsels her when she’s in need or can’t make an essential connection with another person. The tertiary characters, in the form of Miriam’s phone customers—like Vince the mobster—provide corny if always intriguing relief from the action, especially in light of the author’s actual work as a psychic. What succeeds perhaps best in this light-spirited tale about finding one’s way and sticking to it is the relationship between Rory—tall, devoted, and workaholic—and Miriam as they weather marital bitterness and suspicion, but still have sex.
With a title like this, you get your money’s worth.Pub Date: May 11, 2004
ISBN: 0-7432-4478-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
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
APPRECIATIONS
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