Surviving the family whammy, Roy garners sympathy, yet he never quite comes into his own as a character.
The Mississippi author’s second (The Total View of Taftly, 2000) is a complicated, intense coming-of-ager centered on an infatuation seemingly passed from father to son, doing neither of them much good—especially father, who winds up mysteriously dead.
Roy is young when his drunken daddy, Sanders, drifts out of their house on the Florida Panhandle one night and winds up shot to death, but Dad’s patrician memory is kept alive by June, Roy’s mother. The fatal attraction for Sanders was June’s lithe and lovely younger sister April, also their next-door neighbor, for whom he’d carried a flame ever since he first blew into town in 1965, fresh from Vietnam. And after Sanders’s death, when June becomes preoccupied with the political fortunes of a local congressman, Roy goes increasingly to his aunt for company and comfort. From their trailer, April and her hard-drinking husband Leonard raise Roy in the country way his mother so despises: from April he learns to fish; from Leonard, a former star running back, he learns football. Under Leonard’s tutelage, Roy becomes an unstoppable force on the playing field, but as he grows up, his feelings for April become ever more frustrated. June and Leonard, sensing a replay of Sanders’s unhealthy fixation, work to warn Roy off, but not even being thrown through the window of the trailer by Leonard deters him. Finally, when Roy opts to play ball at nearby Florida State instead of a college worthy of Sanders, a vengeful June forces Leonard to check into a rehab program and April to go to a battered women’s home. Roy rescues his aunt and, in New Orleans, drunk and liberated, they resolve the tension between them. They return home, and Roy goes off to college; in time, he learns the full story of Sanders and what happened to him.
Surviving the family whammy, Roy garners sympathy, yet he never quite comes into his own as a character.Pub Date: March 28, 2003
ISBN: 1-56512-370-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2002
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
