An entertainingly creative work, but one that lacks coherence and plausibility.
A journalist turns to color therapy to transcend her emotional pain in this eclectic novel.
In the mid-1990s, middle-aged Iris Miller works for Northern California–based Eco Planet magazine, and she obsesses about her former lovers, her desire to change the world, and her longing for celebrity and wealth. She used to foster kids but was blacklisted by local agencies after she told a social worker about how much she wanted a child of her own, which caused the worker to cite “boundary issues.” She then adopts a baby, whose teenage mother quickly has a change of heart. Iris also has a serious relationship with a man named Felix Moss, who dies of colon cancer. As a member of a Jewish family ravaged by the Holocaust, she’s tortured by her friend Ephraim Kiever’s disclosure that his grandfather was a member of the Nazi party. Later, she attends a Native American peyote ceremony. There, she has a vision of a route to peace in the Middle East, involving the construction of a sweat lodge in Jerusalem, open to members of the three Abrahamic religions. She writes a story based on the vision and travels to Israel to accept a Jerusalem Post award for it. However, two friends whom she invites get kidnapped by the Palestine Liberation Organization. Throughout her trials, she uses color therapy, an alternative medicine treatment that’s said to help heal the body and mind. Author Skolnick-Bagnoli (Shiny Objects, 2009, etc.) has produced an imaginative, discursive, and rollicking tale. Her account of Iris’ turn to color therapy is intriguing, and the book includes a full-color appendix that asserts the healing properties of different hues. However, the plot is so scattered that it seems more like a fragmented series of impressions than a novel, leapfrogging from one thought to the next. Also, although the writing can be refreshingly quirky (“her cougar inclination to pursue the dashing alpha male had remained intact”), it’s never clear how much of the story is intended to be comic, and the vision at the heart of the story is borderline incomprehensible.
An entertainingly creative work, but one that lacks coherence and plausibility.Pub Date: June 6, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9650530-6-8
Page Count: 334
Publisher: Spaceframe Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2017
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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