The opening installment, first published in England in 1979, of a generational trilogy about the luckless Armstrong family of Georgetown by Guyanese writer Heath. From the earliest days of their courtship in 1922, Sonny Armstrong dominates his gentle wife Gladys, whose parents and two sisters quietly cut her off after their marriage—except for a single visit, shortly after their daughter Genetha is born, by Gladys's oldest sister Deborah, which leads only to a quarrel and deeper estrangement. Thrown back on their own family—soon including son Boyie, and their unpaid servants Esther and Marion—Armstrong and his wife sink into ever deeper domestic misery. When his dying father leaves Armstrong's sister most of his property, Armstrong, despondent at being left a mere postal clerk, plots to get his sister's two houses; Marion's intimacy with both partners—she has become Gladys's confidant and Armstrong's lover—leads to the dismissal of Esther; and the illness and death of Armstrong's friend B.A. seems only the necessary blood-sacrifice to his friendship with cautiously licentious Doc. Husband and wife alike play out their roles of quiet desperation as if in a dream that denies what they take to be their true natures- -until Gladys realizes that ``separation from her husband was unthinkable, and when he fell into the abyss the chain that bound their lives would drag her with him.'' Heath, who writes of elemental passions like a minimalist D. H. Lawrence, has fashioned a novel as violent in its suppressed action as his US debut novel, The Murderer (p. 10). One wonders how much hope the sequels can offer the younger Armstrongs.
Pub Date: Jan. 12, 1993
ISBN: 0-89255-175-5
Page Count: 160
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1992
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
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