Neither funny nor insightful enough to rise above the crowd of similar plots.
Pennebaker’s first novel attempts to join the recession-hit chic-lit mini-boomlet with her comedy about an Austin, Texas, divorcée struggling to live under one roof with her adolescent daughter and aging mother.
About to turn 50, Joanie has still not fully adjusted to her divorce two years earlier from lawyer Richard. In fact, she’s sworn off sex all together. Given that this is supposedly a book about hard times, Joanie’s financial situation, even how much Richard is paying in child support, remains vague. After having unbelievably little trouble getting an ad-agency job after years as a stay-at-home mom, she evinces only disdain for the actual work, not to mention her much younger colleagues, and only limited concern over job security. Meanwhile, her personal life is one irritation after another. Her 15-year-old daughter Caroline has turned typically adolescent: impatient, hostile, secretive and mildly rebellious. Not so much unpopular as invisible to her high-school peers, Caroline experiments with cigarettes, pot and wildly dyed hair but remains basically a good girl. Joanie’s aging mother Ivy, who has had to leave her West Texas home and move in with Joanie for financial reasons, is outspoken in disparaging both daughter and granddaughter, and although she’s supposed to be a reactionary shrew, her criticism seems pretty accurate. Her intolerance covers aching loneliness, and the novel’s best scene occurs when Caroline and her only friend bake pot brownies that Ivy devours à la mode. As Ivy’s health fails, Joanie’s brother, Ivy’s blatant favorite, doesn’t visit or lift a finger to help. Richard announces that his much younger girlfriend is expecting a baby and then is out of town on business the rest of the novel. Pennebaker’s male characters are so undeveloped that even in their villainy they seem irrelevant. The novel’s one half-decent guy, Joanie’s co-worker, becomes a lukewarm love interest at best. Eventually, of course, female camaraderie is achieved among the three generations.
Neither funny nor insightful enough to rise above the crowd of similar plots.Pub Date: Jan. 4, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-425-23856-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2010
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
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