Steamy southern bayous, complete with sinkholes of guilt, love, madness, and plenty of sex—this may be Daniell's first novel, but it's territory that she's trekked through before in two memoirs, Sleeping With Soldiers (1984) and Fatal Flowers (1980). Easter O'Brian has risen from her humble beginnings on a dirt farm near Mobile, Alabama, to become an artist of some renown. She is interviewed by art magazines, and her strange, often shocking, paintings are featured in New York exhibits. Along the way, she has paid a price—first, at the hands of her abusive father, later becoming an unwed mother at age 15, enduring a loveless marriage and, finally, suffering through the overwhelming problems of two of her grown children, one psychotic, the other a junkie. In the 1950's as a Good Housekeeping-approved kind of suburban wife, Easter begins taking covert trips to the French Quarter in New Orleans. Watching a transvestite strip-show one night, she realizes ``I had just had my first taste of real perversity. Later, when I involuntarily researched drug addiction, I learned how addicts from the first moment of contact with their drug of choice were hooked, and I was into that.'' Easter, hooked on sex and art, flings off the confines of marriage and goes out to experience all that she can get. But the once-exhilarating 1960's liberation theme is tempered here with its 1990's implications. As Easter looks back, she wonders how accountable she is for her children's troubles. As her son and daughter return from jail or the methadone clinic, she worries about ``the virus.'' The answers she needs do not come easily—she'll continue paying the price. Easter's story is compelling, if unsettling, and, at moments, downright distasteful. Not everyone shares her penchant for perversity, and Daniell's sex scenes tend more toward the seamy than the steamy. Still, Easter O'Brian emerges, vivid as one of her own paintings, affecting as any grieving mother and real to the bone.
Pub Date: Oct. 20, 1992
ISBN: 0-688-08860-0
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1992
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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