A Thai coming-of-age tale mildly spiced with magic realism. Formidable forces converge on 12-year-old Justin's awakening to adolescence. It is 1963, and Justin's best friend Virgil, a black boy from Georgia, introduces him to the richness of black American culture and the prejudice that dogs his family even in Asia. Justin's parents, nearly mythic for their long-term absence, perform top-secret work for the US government as it grows increasingly entangled in Vietnam. A trio of maiden aunts, ``the Three Fates,'' raise Justin on a family estate just outside of Bangkok loaded with intrigue: Two are involved in a fling with a priapic English doctor, and none of the relatives can wait to get their paws on the will of the clan's matriarch, who vows to dance the limbo rock, a reference to an American pop song of the time, before she'll give up the ghost. Somtow (The Wizard's Apprentice, 1993, etc.) creates a convincing voice for Justin to tell of his emergence among so many peculiar factors; and the novel's disparate elements—pathos and humor, reality and fantasy, the traditional Thai household and encroaching American culture—often coalesce to form a seamless whole. The novel climaxes in the staging of a play Justin writes, in which he fuses Greek and African myth and the American Civil War into a drama that serves as a strangely fitting emblem for the young man he is about to become. But some of the oddly shaped building blocks of Somtow's style don't fit together. Virgil speaks in an awkward dialect that doesn't sound much like African-American English, and some lines—``My parents are into cultural diversity or something''—are simply too anachronistic to be believable. Still, the novel succeeds as a poignant, piquant portrait of a boy and his world on the threshold of transformation.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-312-11834-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1994
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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