An admittedly engaging if often melodramatic tale: high-brow soap.
Overboiled historical romance set during the London Blitz.
Ostensibly the story of Maggie Dunlap, British newcomer Hely (a.k.a. Lady Sally Collins) introduces a vast catalogue of characters, most unlikable. Though not yet 18, gentle Maggie is hired as a nursery maid for the Dulcimer family. Her father is the tyrannical keeper of the Dulcimer’s Scottish lodge, and Maggie’s journey south to the Sussex estate will save her from drudgery and beatings. Lord and Lady Dulcimer are kind enough, but their son Dart is a bit of a cad, well matching the temperament of his brother’s widow, and his sometimes lover, Antonia. It is Antonia’s children that Maggie looks after, including oldest Abby, who takes a particular shine to Maggie. When Dart drops Antonia, she rebounds with a marriage to David Vorst, ten years her junior and cousin to the Dulcimer family. At the beginning of the Blitz, it is decided that Antonia’s children (along with a whole cadre of related children, nannies and the odd governess) will stay with the Vorsts in America, and Maggie goes along. Maggie blossoms in America, becomes thinner, more confident, even learns how to drive a car. Meanwhile, back home, David Vorst joins the Royal Air Force, while trying to keep managerial reign on the London Vorst Hotel, which older brother Conway wants to steal away from him. Maggie is forced back to England (despite her rescue of Abby from a kidnapping plot!) when an evil nanny has it out for her. Later, she joins the women’s branch of the RAF, where she’s assigned on a secret mission with David Vorst, by now her secret love object.
An admittedly engaging if often melodramatic tale: high-brow soap.Pub Date: May 20, 2003
ISBN: 0-312-30532-X
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2003
Less bleak than the subject matter might warrant—Hannah’s default outlook is sunny—but still, a wrenching depiction of war’s...
The traumatic homecoming of a wounded warrior.
The daughter of alcoholics who left her orphaned at 17, Jolene “Jo” Zarkades found her first stable family in the military: She’s served over two decades, first in the army, later with the National Guard. A helicopter pilot stationed near Seattle, Jo copes as competently at home, raising two daughters, Betsy and Lulu, while trying to dismiss her husband Michael’s increasing emotional distance. Jo’s mettle is sorely tested when Michael informs her flatly that he no longer loves her. Four-year-old Lulu clamors for attention while preteen Betsy, mean-girl-in-training, dismisses as dweeby her former best friend, Seth, son of Jo’s confidante and fellow pilot, Tami. Amid these challenges comes the ultimate one: Jo and Tami are deployed to Iraq. Michael, with the help of his mother, has to take over the household duties, and he rapidly learns that parenting is much harder than his wife made it look. As Michael prepares to defend a PTSD-afflicted veteran charged with Murder I for killing his wife during a dissociative blackout, he begins to understand what Jolene is facing and to revisit his true feelings for her. When her helicopter is shot down under insurgent fire, Jo rescues Tami from the wreck, but a young crewman is killed. Tami remains in a coma and Jo, whose leg has been amputated, returns home to a difficult rehabilitation on several fronts. Her nightmares in which she relives the crash and other horrors she witnessed, and her pain, have turned Jo into a person her daughters now fear (which in the case of bratty Betsy may not be such a bad thing). Jo can't forgive Michael for his rash words. Worse, she is beginning to remind Michael more and more of his homicide client. Characterization can be cursory: Michael’s earlier callousness, left largely unexplained, undercuts the pathos of his later change of heart.
Less bleak than the subject matter might warrant—Hannah’s default outlook is sunny—but still, a wrenching depiction of war’s aftermath.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-312-57720-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2012
A super-exorcism that leaves the taste of somebody else's blood in your mouth and what a bad taste it is. King presents us with the riddle of a small Maine town that has been deserted overnight. Where did all the down-Easters go? Matter of fact, they're still there but they only get up at sundown. . . for a warm drink. . . .Ben Mears, a novelist, returns to Salem's Lot (pop. 1319), the hometown he hasn't seen since he was four years old, where he falls for a young painter who admires his books (what happens to her shouldn't happen to a Martian). Odd things are manifested. Someone rents the ghastly old Marsten mansion, closed since a horrible double murder-suicide in 1939; a dog is found impaled on a spiked fence; a healthy boy dies of anemia in one week and his brother vanishes. Ben displays tremendous calm considering that you're left to face a corpse that sits up after an autopsy and sinks its fangs into the coroner's neck. . . . Vampirism, necrophilia, et dreadful alia rather overplayed by the author of Carrie (1974).
Pub Date: Oct. 17, 1975
ISBN: 0385007515
Page Count: 458
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1975
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