The eight stories in this debut volume vary greatly in style but not in subject. They're all about the things women will do for love, with few of Huss's female protagonists finding much happiness as a result. The one exception seems to be the lesbian couple in ``Three Gold Chains,'' whose S&M revelry is interrupted by a young burglar, an event they eventually translate into heightened sexual thrills. Huss punctuates this and other stories with pretentious quotations and authorial intrusions. ``Barrier Methods,'' also padded with the words of others, concerns a Ph.D. student in classics whose recent abortion alters her feelings for her husband; she finds greater satisfaction masturbating with a copy of Ovid clamped to her nipple. Huss's prose experiments mostly wander when they don't plain baffle. In ``Triptych,'' a woman learns to breathe fire as a way to avenge molestation by a museum guard. ``Rubber Thongs,'' written in different voices, records the passions of a woman who works with the handicapped, and ends with the nonsense words of her patients. The much-anthologized ``Coupon for Blood'' is a weird but gripping account of a bus ride from hell, where strangers' lives briefly intersect. In the more conventional title story, a recently deflowered 19-year-old leaves home to work on her uncle's tobacco farm rather than face her parents. ``The Pastime The Pastime'' meanders through the memories of a woman whose husband is dying from lung cancer. Equally maudlin, ``What Iris Wanted'' is the story of a black grandmother's attempt to fulfill the wishes of her white daughter-in-law, dead from cancer. Beginner's tales, best left in the small magazines in which some of them first appeared.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-8262-0816-9
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Univ. of Missouri
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1991
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
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
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