Downtown meets Brooklyn, Pygmalion meets Faust, and Marilyn Monroe meets the devil—in this rollicking contemporary fairy tale by first-novelist Thomas. For 40 years in Flatbush, Jack has quietly worked at his bench at Reliable Shoe Repair by day and in his secret room, carving luxuriant Renaissance angels out of ebony and ash, by night—all the time waiting, somewhat hopelessly now, for the reappearance of his wife Angela, who mysteriously failed to come home from a shopping trip in 1952. Instead, two things happen: Jack's elderly neighbor Mrs. Rice dies, replaced by a tenant Jack thinks of as ``the mass murderer'' because he uproots and otherwise desecrates Mrs. Rice's lovely garden, over which Jack's secret room has looked for more than half a century; and a sweet 19-year-old waif named Lucille—an aspiring Marilyn Monroe imitator—wanders into Reliable to have her waitressing shoes fixed and wins Jack's grandfatherly affections. That's when the trouble starts. At a Marilyn look-alike contest to which Jack accompanies her, Lucille meets Buddy Lomax- -agency photographer, image banker, and master operator of a diabolical computerized photographic collage-making device called the Hell; Buddy promises to make Lucille more like Marilyn than Marilyn and begins by sending her to dermabrasionists and plastic surgeons. By now Lucille is living in Jack's apartment, and Buddy tricks her into letting him peek at the lavish, jewel-eyed backroom angels, which—being even more beautiful than his own creation in Lucille—he decides to steal: First he'll try compiling a phony photographic life-history of the missing Angela on the Hell machine and pretend to Jack that he can locate her—in exchange for the angels; if that doesn't work (and it doesn't), Buddy will frame Jack for the murder of the loutish next-door neighbor, who's been found dead in Mrs. Rice's garden.... Like Walker Percy in his early novels, Thomas possesses a real gift for the lyrical and fabulous: an impressive, oddball pleasure.
Pub Date: June 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-679-42363-X
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1993
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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