paper 0-8101-5079-4 Elegiac in tone and modest in ambition, this first book by a midwestern poet adds a touch of magic realism to narratives about a lost agricultural world, with deliberate echoes of his prairie-poet ancestors, Sandburg, Masters, and Vachel Lindsay. —Extending [his] lines,— like the Indian fishermen he depicts, Fay mulls over scenes from the past: a faded photo of a girl holding a record-sized catfish caught in the Spoon River; a painting of Indians spearfishing in Virginia; and the remains found at a building site in Peoria. Man’s connection to the natural world underpins his two long sequences: —The Milkweed Parables— is a generational tale, beginning with a young German immigrant girl’s apprentice to a local widow who teaches her home remedies; when the girl grows up to become a war widow herself, she has a son who survives battle in the next war by wearing a flotation device stuffed with midwestern milkweed, the same weeds that doomed his earlier attempts at farming. Later, the vest becomes a historical curiosity examined by a niece in a museum. As in the poem —crossings,— things move through time and space: termites, Indians, milkweed seeds, a rocking chair, bullets, and letters. The lure and push of landscape is at the center of his other long poem, set in the Lower Illinois Valley (—The Book of Lowilva—): step-siblings remember their lost youth in Buffalo Prairie, with its spring seasons of —plowing and pyromania,—and the desire to head further west. Fay locates the self both in nature and in his larger historical narrative—his verse speaks plainly and compellingly.
Pub Date: June 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-8101-5078-6
Page Count: 96
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1998
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
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