This intelligent, psychologically acute and truly spooky ghost story is an entertaining, impressive debut.
After tragedy strikes a young family, the survivors move to a new, creepy apartment, and they’re haunted by more than just their grief.
This absorbing novel begins like a well-written but not otherwise unusual story of a disintegrating marriage following the death of a young child, but it soon takes a spooky turn. Alison and Brian Graham are still in acute mourning when Brian impulsively sells their house and buys the plain and ugly Apartment 5F. With too much time on his hands thanks to a lucrative textbook contract, Brian drinks heavily, takes pills, tries to write his novel and pays sporadic attention to Emma, their young daughter. Alison, already a troubled, unhappy person (she cuts herself), sees her therapist to little avail and returns to work, but she moons over an old boyfriend. As the novel continues, strange, unsettling elements begin creeping in, at first subtly and then overtly. Comforting Emma after a nightmare, Brian makes out the face of a man in the darkness with expressionless black eyes, inches away. The vision disappears, but before Brian can dismiss it as a booze-and-pills hallucination, Emma confirms it: “You saw him, too…right, daddy?” In his debut novel, Bisig expertly builds tension, ratcheting up the horror as Brian—an unreliable narrator, but in what way?—spirals into what might be drugs, might be insanity, might be the supernatural. Bisig gets inside his characters’ heads brilliantly, making them understandable even when they are unsympathetic. His portrait of addictive thinking is spot-on: “[E]ven though he completely understood Dr. Shah’s advice to not drink and drug, the way Brian looked at it, that was intended for people who couldn’t handle their liquor.” Original, powerful images add to the novel’s impact—“their marriage was dangerous and unstable, like uranium or November ice”; “the drink cart demanded subtle attention, like a blinking cursor.”
This intelligent, psychologically acute and truly spooky ghost story is an entertaining, impressive debut.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2014
ISBN: 978-1500780951
Page Count: 342
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 27, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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