Quite a valuable history lesson, despite its stock types.
A nine-year-old boy wanders through war-torn El Salvador, trying to find his mother and stay out of the line of fire, in this lucid but limited tale.
Benítez (Bitter Grounds, 1997, etc.) sets her third novel in the six-week period between two recent cataclysms of Salvadoran history: the March 1980 funeral of assassinated Archbishop Oscar Romero, at which 35 mourners were killed; and the military’s massacre of 600 fleeing peasants on the Honduran border. Although her protagonist, Nicolás de la Virgen Veras, lives in the countryside with his grandfather, he goes to San Salvador to join his mother at “the funeral of a martyred saint.” When violence breaks out at the cathedral, Nicolás’s mother is killed by a bullet. Separated from her body by chaotic circumstances, the boy thinks she’s still alive, but he doesn’t have the address of the house where she was a servant. So he journeys back to his rural village, only to find it abandoned and devastated by bombings. As he roams about, Nicolás meets both leftist guerrillas and right-wing army soldiers—all of whom say exactly what you’d expect—and comes to understand the tragedy of being caught in the middle. As Benítez notes, “While the two sides fought for their principles, most of the dying was done by the people.” Contrasting with the novel’s usual plainspoken realism are the occasional manifestations of the Virgin Mary, who gives guidance and reassurance to Nicolás during his most harrowing moments. Such scenes—when, for example, a statuette of the Virgin actually speaks to the little boy—are authentically weird and sometimes a bit mawkish. But they don’t distract from Benítez’s vivid portrait of a time and place in which even children are murdered without second thought.
Quite a valuable history lesson, despite its stock types.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-7868-6399-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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