Inventive fantasy in a first novel from a Boston writer. In 2002, as viewers are watching the World Cup soccer finals between Brazil and Hungary, every television in the world goes dead. Instinctively, a Brazilian peasant named Paco knows that the key to this calamity lies with charismatic astronaut Gregory Fisher, and half the novel involves Paco and his beautiful wife Maria's dauntless trek to find him. There are many narrators: a physician who falls in love with Maria; one of Fisher's old girlfriends; a talent agent who scouts Maria (a singer). Fisher, it seems, has been to space too many times: he glows in the dark; he can walk on air. He hitchhikes aboard a space shuttle and sights a huge tree growing near Lake Chad, and therein lies the mystery—but what does it mean? Our last clues are delivered through the earnest investigations of a fifth-grade class, whose teacher, the gifted Miss Hsu-ling, runs off with Fisher in the final scenes. Sutton's intentions are not to make acid observations about the impact of television, except in a subtle and whimsical way. She has a light touch, as in her sly, passing jokes about Dan Quayle, and lingers over each of her characters—even overextending things somewhat—in this slightest of yarns. The reason the televisions stopped has no scientific explanation; it was a kind of dark mood, shared simultaneously among all humankind, that did it. Similarly, the televisions start again almost on a whim. Everything we call reality, Sutton seems to be saying, hangs on a contrivance, and wafts away with an errant thought. A deft, modern folk tale, in its whimsical moments reminiscent of Madeleine L'Engle.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-15-123994-0
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
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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