Movie lovers will enjoy Voorhees’s gentle satire of the business of film as high art. Unfortunately, the human drama that...
Film critic Voorhees’s fiction debut about a young American journalist searching for information about her dead mother while attending the Cannes Film Festival.
Returning to France to cover the film festival, French-born Nattie has her own secret agenda. At age six, Nattie, her mother and her mother’s boyfriend Claudel were struck by lightning while picnicking near Cannes. Her mother died and Nattie was sent back to her American father, who hadn’t known she existed and who always refused to discuss her mother. Now Nattie wants to find out more. In Paris, she leaves a phone message for Claudel, who soon comes to see her in Cannes. He is barely 20 years her senior, handsome and sensitive—in movie terms, Louis Jordan to her Leslie Caron—and it’s quickly obvious where their relationship is heading despite a flirtatious Canadian journalist pursuing Nattie and the slightly creepy fact that Claudel was Nattie’s mother’s lover. Meanwhile, Nattie runs into the producer Jacques Vidanne, who directed Nattie’s mother in her one film role. According to Claudel, Vidanne was obsessed with her and made her funeral arrangements. Despite Vidanne’s efforts to evade her, Nattie soon learns the big secret: Nattie’s mother never actually died but was severely brain-damaged. Vidanne spirited her away from the hospital, married her and built a fortress on Corsica where Nattie finds her living like a beautiful child under his care. Having made peace with her past, Nattie is ready for her life with Claudel. The novel’s most fascinating character is the festival itself. Liberally scattering film references, some titillating, some obscure, Voorhees offers a lively insider’s view: the crowded pressroom, the gala parties, the rounds of actor interviews, the non-stop movies that range from awesome to awful.
Movie lovers will enjoy Voorhees’s gentle satire of the business of film as high art. Unfortunately, the human drama that unfurls is less winning.Pub Date: May 1, 2007
ISBN: 0-7432-9195-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2007
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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