by Steven Lee Gilbert ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 23, 2012
Despite this title’s shortcomings, readers will be eager to return to the table for Gilbert’s next work.
Gilbert’s debut novel reduces the mess of child custody and parental kidnapping into a few elemental ingredients.
Divorced school teacher Anna Miller is about to depart for Genova, Italy, with her son, Oliver. For reasons the book doesn’t provide, Oliver’s father, Evan, has custody of the child, and Anna and Oliver are running away. Because the author’s descriptions are so bare, chapter titles—which identify the character covered in each chapter—are like breadcrumbs enabling readers to follow the story. Using a limited third-person point of view to navigate through short scenes, the novel drops subtle hints about the players without fully developing them. When Evan confiscates a card Oliver made for Anna, it’s clear he will never win any Father of the Year awards; however, even in this scene it’s difficult for readers to judge him as an unfit parent. To determine how serious his issues might be, readers are left to fill in the blanks while watching his new relationship fall apart or read between the lines of his dialogue with the FBI agents and private investigators he hires to track down Anna and Oliver. The author’s treatment of dialogue—sans quotation marks, without descriptions of inflection or volume—adds a feeling of complicity to the sparse prose, as if readers have overheard something that’s wrong but not entirely illegal. This literary device leaves readers feeling uncomfortable, as they’re probably meant to be. The well-crafted plot is meted out at a steady pace, continually feeding readers’ need to know and simultaneously whetting the appetite for more. Unfortunately, the novel doesn’t end on a wholly satisfying note, mostly because Anna isn’t as completely developed as the sheriff, the book’s most likable, fully formed character.
Despite this title’s shortcomings, readers will be eager to return to the table for Gilbert’s next work.Pub Date: March 23, 2012
ISBN: 978-0985336509
Page Count: 282
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 19, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951
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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by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2006
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
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