A former beauty queen wrestles with her roles of daughter, mother, and wife of an adulterer—in Gilbert's funny, at times insightful, novel (Hairdo, Dixie Riggs). Pammy Outlaw, ex-Miss South Carolina, is slim and beautiful, mother of a beautiful, smart 12-year-old, but her life is a nightmare. Handsome husband Flick, formerly a good provider, has gone back to school for his Ph.D. in lit; she, meanwhile, has no intellectual pretensions—we get to hear Flick deconstruct a fish tank—but it still hurts when Flick and his new friends snub her. Furthermore, Flick complains about the expense of Pammy's dragging daughter Evie on the same sort of beauty pageant circuit that made Pammy's childhood miserable. Then Pammy finds Flick's hotel bill from a liaison with a fellow grad student...so it's home to mother, the ex-Miss New Jersey. We learn that Pammy has often fantasized killing her mother with hatchets, yet she says, ``...the greatest love in the world is the love that goes on between a mother and a daughter and it never makes any sense at all.'' As Evie approaches puberty, we also learn that Pammy had an abortion at 13. Now, a pair of summer gloves handed down through the women of the family are given to Pammy by her mother, to supplement the rest of the handed-down burdens, like fear of food and a warped self-image. To top if off, her mother has entered the three of them in a grandmother-mother-daughter beauty contest. Pammy's good-girl self says she should get back together with the joyless Flick, but instead she has a fling with Sam—a middle-aged pilot and lawyer with sexy hands—and, eventually, learns to ``fly'' on her own. A rollicking good farce, if told by a somewhat unreliable, self-contradictory—and occasionally tiresomely repetitive— narrator.
Pub Date: April 23, 1993
ISBN: 0-446-51689-9
Page Count: 208
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 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
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
