Unlike Jane Austen’s classic exploration of passion versus reserve, this homage to Sense and Sensibility itself falls victim to exaggeration and melodrama. As in the original, there are three Dashwood sisters, the eldest calm and the second impulsive. They live with their mother in the ancestral family home, which their father vacated when he fell for a young, fake-breasted health nut and remarried. He soon dies penniless and the destitute Dashwoods remove to a small cottage. Ellie and Abby (the eldest and middle sisters) have plotlines similar to Sense and Sensibility, with boys filling the same roles as in the original, but revelations fall flat. Rushton uses a jarring combination of Austen and update; for example, why is eldest sister Ellie named after Austen’s Elinor but second sister Abby not named after Austen’s Marianne? Hard-to-believe details include emotions that change too quickly and muttered put-downs that the victim (standing right there) never hears. Leans vaguely on Austen’s structure without developing its own substance or grace; unsatisfying. (Fiction. 10-13)
Pub Date: April 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7868-5136-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
The best day of Michael Mackenzie's life becomes the worst when the bullet he exuberantly fires into the air during his 17th birthday party comes down a mile away and kills a man. When he hears the story on the radio, the news hits him like a lightning bolt. Numbly following the advice of his best friend, Joe, he buries the rifle and tries, without much success, to get on with life. So does the victim's 15-year-old daughter, Jenna, who had been present when the bullet struck. Switching between Michael's point-of-view and Jenna's, McDonald (Comfort Creek, 1996) sends the two teenagers dancing slowly toward each other, using mutual acquaintances, chance meetings at parties and the community pool, and glimpses at a distance. Both go through parallel phases of denial, both are tortured by remorse, exhibit behavior changes, and experience strange dreams; both eventually find ways to ease their grief and guilt. When the police close in, Joe takes the blame, giving Michael the nerve to confess. In the final chapter, McDonald shifts to present tense and brings Michael and Jenna to a cathartic meeting under a huge sycamore said in local Lenape legend to be a place of healing—an elaborate and, considering the suburban setting and familiar contemporary characters, awkward graft in this deliberately paced but deeply felt drama. (Fiction. 11-13)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-385-32309-3
Page Count: 245
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1997
Curtis debuts with a ten-year-old's lively account of his teenaged brother's ups and downs. Ken tries to make brother Byron out to be a real juvenile delinquent, but he comes across as more of a comic figure: getting stuck to the car when he kisses his image in a frozen side mirror, terrorized by his mother when she catches him playing with matches in the bathroom, earning a shaved head by coming home with a conk. In between, he defends Ken from a bully and buries a bird he kills by accident. Nonetheless, his parents decide that only a long stay with tough Grandma Sands will turn him around, so they all motor from Michigan to Alabama, arriving in time to witness the infamous September bombing of a Sunday school. Ken is funny and intelligent, but he gives readers a clearer sense of Byron's character than his own and seems strangely unaffected by his isolation and harassment (for his odd look—he has a lazy eye—and high reading level) at school. Curtis tries to shoehorn in more characters and subplots than the story will comfortably bear—as do many first novelists—but he creates a well-knit family and a narrator with a distinct, believable voice. (Fiction. 10-12)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-385-32175-9
Page Count: 210
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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