A quite celebration of the examined life lived with rueful acceptance.
A slice-of-life quietly chronicles the ways domestic lives are roiled by unexpected changes and losses that challenge a retired couple’s good intentions.
Like all finely wrought novels celebrating domesticity, appearances are deceptive as seemingly placid and conventional characters confront inner turmoil and even the most ordered suburbs are subject to violence. The protagonist in this latest from Booker winner (1974) Middleton (Changes and Chances, 1992, etc.) is John Stone, 67 and the retired headmaster of a distinguished state school. John and his wife, Peg, live in Beechnall, a provincial town in the English Midlands, where both are still involved in the community. They have a large semidetached Victorian villa with a garden that John tends daily, and their neighbors are Annie and Harry Fisher, whose house is a mirror image of theirs. As the story begins, Peg is away in Scotland with older sister May, and when Annie Fisher comes over for tea, she tells John she has a lump in her breast and must undergo some tests. While she talks, John remembers how she seduced him when he first came to Beechnall, and how over the years they had intermittently continued their relationship. As John’s memories mix with the present, he and Peg try to help May, a widow who’s being courted by an obsessive widower; counsel both May’s son John James and his partner, Linda, a successful banker like John James, who wants him to give up his job and live in the country; and comfort Annie when Harry suddenly dies. Never sure that their efforts matter, they still feel obliged to help, though their world is changing: a car is abandoned and set on fire on their nice street; before he dies, Harry is questioned by the police because a woman he had a relationship with has been murdered; and May’s suitor, discouraged, has an emotional collapse in her home.
A quite celebration of the examined life lived with rueful acceptance.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-09-179949-X
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Hutchinson/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
