Mysteries sacred and profane—daughter Clare may have murdered her husband—are provocatively plumbed as the high-minded Kerslakes gather for their holiday in Scotland. Here, Maitland's usual feminist concerns (Virgin Territory, 1986, etc.) are secondary to questions of religious faith and how to live life to the fullest—suitable questions for a novel that, despite its progressive sympathies, is reminiscent of another era. It's an era when upper-class families gather on ancestral ground to confide, confess, and resolve family crises with minimal ill- feeling and melodrama. Clare Kerslake, an adopted member of this civilized world—her beautiful mother had been James Kerslake's sister—is haunted by the childhood memory of seeing her parents laughing together before they died in an explosion. Now 30-ish, she is recovering from an accident in which, while climbing a dangerous mountain in Zimbabwe, she lost her memory and her right hand. She may also have killed husband David there—at least that's what she told her African rescuers. While the family try to help Clare remember—all she recalls is wanting David dead—they also address the problems of son Ben, an Anglican priest recently defrocked because he's gay, and daughter Felicity, who cannot accept her child's deafness. Expeditions are arranged to prod Clare's memory, but it is only when youngest sister Ceci, a nun, asserts that God is all that is beautiful and dangerous that Clare begins to understand herself and a little of what happened. She'd renounced a lesbian lover out of fear; she'd been afraid of David, of climbing. Now she can go back to Zimbabwe, confront the mountain, and always ``dance near the edge of destruction, willing to fall because it was beautiful.'' Intelligent if earnest writing as Maitland fearlessly tackles the great mysteries: an often old-fashioned novel that is also an affecting story of love in its infinite variety.
Pub Date: Feb. 11, 1994
ISBN: 0-8050-2536-7
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1993
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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