SWIMMING NAKED

Name: SWIMMING NAKED
Author: Stacy Sims
ISBN: 0-670-03290-5

by Stacy Sims ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 29, 2004

A standard belated-coming-of-ager, but nicely worked out and genuinely affecting—even if too long and sometimes plodding.

bookshelf

Cincinnati columnist Sims debuts with the ordeal of a young woman who returns to her childhood home to put her family ghosts to rest.

Thirty-year-old Lucy Greene still has a lot of unfinished business when it comes to her family. A photography curator at a midwestern museum, she is too busy with her own life—finishing her master’s thesis, planning exhibitions, etc.—to find much time to ruminate on the past. But when she is called down to Florida to nurse her 58-year-old mother, Fay, through the last stages of lung cancer, Lucy finds that she has to make her reckonings pretty fast. Apart from the obvious shock of her mother’s disease, there is the inexplicable behavior of Lucy’s older sister Anna, who had been alerted to her mother’s condition months earlier (when treatment might still have made a difference) but did absolutely nothing. Always flighty as a child, Anna has grown up to become a full-fledged drunk (now going though rehab for the umpteenth time), but Lucy is not in the forgiving mood and considers her a selfish egomaniac. The greatest shock of all, though, comes when Fay tells Lucy that she is still in touch with their Frank, who disappeared when Lucy was six. A printer’s mechanic, Frank was struck by lightning at the Greenes’ lakeside summerhouse in Canada and became a kind of hapless lunatic as a result. Now Lucy learns that he’s been living in Florida with her aunt Martha ever since. So it seems like a tradeoff, of sorts: Lucy goes to Florida to lose her mother, but she finds her father in the process.

A standard belated-coming-of-ager, but nicely worked out and genuinely affecting—even if too long and sometimes plodding.

Pub Date: March 29, 2004

ISBN: 0-670-03290-5

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2004

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

bookshelf

THE LEGEND OF THE LADY SLIPPER

AN OJIBWE TALE

adapted by Lise Lunge-Larsen & Margi Preus ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 1999

bookshelf

Lunge-Larsen and Preus debut with this story of a flower that blooms for the first time to commemorate the uncommon courage of a girl who saves her people from illness. The girl, an Ojibwe of the northern woodlands, knows she must journey to the next village to get the healing herb, mash-ki- ki, for her people, who have all fallen ill. After lining her moccasins with rabbit fur, she braves a raging snowstorm and crosses a dark frozen lake to reach the village. Then, rather than wait for morning, she sets out for home while the villagers sleep. When she loses her moccasins in the deep snow, her bare feet are cut by icy shards, and bleed with every step until she reaches her home. The next spring beautiful lady slippers bloom from the place where her moccasins were lost, and from every spot her injured feet touched. Drawing on Ojibwe sources, the authors of this fluid retelling have peppered the tale with native words and have used traditional elements, e.g., giving voice to the forces of nature. The accompanying watercolors, with flowing lines, jewel tones, and decorative motifs, give stately credence to the story’s iconic aspects. (Picture book/folklore. 4-8)

Pub Date: March 1, 1999

ISBN: 0-395-90512-5

Page Count: 32

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1999

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

bookshelf

SHOCK WAVE

by Clive Cussler ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 2, 1996

bookshelf

Cussler's most adult, least comic-strip-y entry yet in the Dirk Pitt sea sagas. Gone is the outlandish plotting of Treasure (1988), when Dirk found Cleopatra's barge in Texas, and of Sahara (199), which unearthed Lincoln's body in a Confederate sub—buried in the desert sands. Now, in his 11th outing, Dirk Pitt and his National Underwater and Marine Agency (NUMA) fight villainous megalomaniac Arthur Dorsett, head of Dorsett Consolidated Mining, which holds the world's wealthiest diamond-mine empire. Pitt and his team must fight as well Dorsett's three daughters, the coldly beauteous Amazonian Boudicca, whose giant strength dwarfs Dirk's; the elegant but heartless Deirdre; and the star-crossed zoologist Maeve, whose bastard twins are held captive by grandfather Arthur so that Maeve will infiltrate NUMA and report on its investigation of his holdings—even though Dirk recently saved Maeve and Deirdre's lives in the Antarctic. First, however, Cussler takes us back to 1856 and a typhoon-battered British clipper ship, the Gladiator, that sinks in uncharted seas off Australia; only eight survive, including Jess Dorsett "the highwayman," a dandyish-looking convict, who discovers raw diamonds when stranded on an uninhabited island. From this arises the Dorsett empire, bent on undermining the world market in diamonds by dumping a colossal backlog of stones and colored gems into its vast chain of jewelry stores and, with one blow, toppling De Beers and all rivals. Worse, Arthur Dorsett excavates by high-energy-pulsed ultrasound, and when ultrasound from all four of his island mines (one on Gladiator Island, near New Zealand, another by Easter Island, the last two in the North Pacific Ocean) happen to converge, a killer shock wave destroys all marine and human life for 30 kilometers around, and now threatens over a million people in Hawaii—unless Dirk Pitt's aging body can hold it back. Tireless mechanical nomenclature, but furious storytelling.