A hopeful but sometimes saccharine story about family renewal and the power of prayer.
Hart goes straight for the heartstrings in his debut novel about a virtuous woman determined to smooth out the rifts within her family.
While Gail Rollins is on bed rest in the hospital during her pregnancy, a nurse brings a little girl named Lexie into her room and into her life. Lexie survived a car crash, but her parents were taken to a different hospital. Gail promises the injured girl that she’ll be there for her. To cement that promise, she gives a small stuffed dog toy to Lexie (after detaching it from a stuffed-dog “family”). But just after Lexie returns from surgery, Gail is discharged and leaves the girl behind in the hospital, alone. Sixteen years later, Gail is still haunted by her inability to keep her promise. In the throes of prayer, she receives a strong “impression” that compels her to hold a family reunion in her house at Christmastime. During the reunion, Gail butts heads with her neglectful sister-in-law, cleans up after her tornado of a nephew, manages her own two children, and reconnects with her brother Dale, a diplomat. She also has an unexpected encounter with long-lost family members at the food court in the mall. The sweetest relationship in the book is between Gail and the prodigal Dale—one marked by frustration and misunderstanding as well as tenderness and forgiveness. Mostly, though, Gail passes the reunion putting out fires. Throughout, Hart focuses a good deal on Gail’s reliance on prayer and on what the family is eating. At one point, for example, due to a kitchen mishap, Gail’s homemade food is replaced at the last minute by a local caterer’s canceled order for a Mexican feast. Characters opine on the dangers of Mexican cuisine, becoming gratuitous and slightly xenophobic in their fixation: “I’ll need to buy some air fresheners for the house by the time your family has eaten Mexican food for a week.” The opening scenes at the hospital are the most narratively potent and stirring portion of the book. The remainder of the story, though, tends to be sentimental and righteous in tone.
A hopeful but sometimes saccharine story about family renewal and the power of prayer.Pub Date: Dec. 11, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4917-8429-7
Page Count: 202
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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