No surprises or challenges, but a pleasant, undemanding enough read.
The author of 15 novels (Footprints, 1996, etc.) about women coming into their own offers another feel-good story, here focusing on a single mother in suburban New Orleans who has lived too long in the shadow of her “perfect” sister.
Years ago, Ella ran away from her parents’ Texas home to marry Buddy against their wishes while her sister Terrell made a proper match with an up-and-coming lawyer. Ella and Buddy’s marriage turned into the expected disaster. Only his death several years after deserting Ella and their daughter Birdie has afforded Ella a modicum of respectability through widowhood. This she clings to by sending her mother, the intimidating Agatha, letters full of fantasy upper-middle-class whoppers remote from her modest life as a plant caretaker. A few months after the plane-crash death of Terrell has devastated the family—particularly Agatha, who clearly favored her older daughter—Ella and Birdie visit Texas for Agatha’s birthday. Ella is reunited with her sister’s grieving widower Rufus; long-simmering sparks ignite a predictable though not unsatisfying romance. As the affair deepens, Ella begins to recognize that Terrell suffered from her own demons and may have envied Ella as much as Ella envied her. The story trots along at a brisk clip, and Ella has her endearing moments, particularly while musing on her daughter’s fatherless state, but her unrelenting spunk can prove hard on a reader’s nerves. For her part, perpetually loving, helpful Birdie is too good a teenaged daughter to be believable (or even likable), while Agatha is too bad a mother to take seriously. Hearon’s male characters are more nuanced: Rufus has some edge and a sense of humor, Terrell’s adulterous lover shows generous passion, and Buddy combines a capacity for love and tyranny.
No surprises or challenges, but a pleasant, undemanding enough read.Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2001
ISBN: 0-375-41038-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2000
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
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