A good-humored but incurably cornball tale.
Naïve, sex-starved son of a hellfire Baptist preacher sets out across Depression-era America to find his father’s hidden fortune and save his family.
Tobias Henry, a self-proclaimed “bad Baptist,” narrates his own coming-of-age story with an eye for the absurd and a pseudo-Twain-like twang. When his father is blinded in an accident (a bird craps in his eye), Tobias is dispatched to Texas with only $37, a little biblical knowledge and a map that will lead him to buried treasure on the old family farm. Hapless and preoccupied by opposing feelings of piety and lust, Tobias loses the treasure map, and a prostitute takes all his money, leaving him a virgin. An old, Longfellow-quoting, oddly philo-Semitic black hobo named Craw then adopts him. Together, they ride the rails, take refuge in hobo jungles and witness the despair Hoover’s Depression has wrought. Craw is bawdy, mischievous, yet Wise, with a capital “W.” He imparts home cures and truths about snakebites, Jesus, sex, love and life to his clueless pupil. Once in Texas, and welcomed into the bosom of his eccentric family, Tobias falls in love with Sarah, a prickly but pretty farmhand. Before they can be together, though, he must dispel the old Indian curse that haunts Sarah and killed off her previous beau. At times sweet and funny, Conner’s novel is ultimately an attempt at Twainian allegory without key components: no moral center, weak symbolism, no raft and no river. The hobo’s long line of boxcars can’t replace the mighty Mississippi, and without that grand metaphor–and Twain’s mastery at spinning yarns–readers are left wading in shallow waters.
A good-humored but incurably cornball tale.Pub Date: July 7, 2007
ISBN: 978-1419-667398
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
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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