Vintage Miller (While I Was Gone, 1998, etc.): a quiet, subtle story of longing, loss, and the compensations that,...
A middle-aged woman tries to make a fresh start when her marriage ends and in the process discovers long-hidden family secrets that eerily echo her own experience.
When Catherine Hubbard’s second marriage founders and her Aunt Rue leaves her the family home in Vermont, she decides to take a sabbatical from teaching and head back East. Her three children, Jeff, Fiona, and married, pregnant Karen, are all grown up, and, drawn by happy recollections of living with her grandparents, she returns to claim her legacy. The house, she finds, has been tastefully redecorated by the former tenant, retired academic widower Samuel Eliasson, who still lives in the village. As she settles in, she finds her grandmother’s diaries in a trunk in the attic, begins reading them, and soon has the sense that her life is recapitulating her grandmother’s. Georgia Rice, the eldest of three, had taken charge when her mother died early. At 19 she was diagnosed with tuberculosis, and the family doctor John Holbrooke sent her to a nearby sanitarium to rest. Cut off from the outside world by infection and looming death, Georgia had fallen in love with fellow-patient Seward. Their affair would affect the marriage Georgia made after she was cured to the much older John Holbrooke. Catherine also recalls her own mother’s suicide, the happy years she spent living with her grandparents, and the two husbands who left her for other women. Tempted to live in a world that seems as self-contained as the sanitarium, Catherine starts dating Samuel Eliasson. But real life, with its mixture of compromise and unexpected satisfactions, intrudes, and Catherine, like Georgia, must return to a more intractable home when her daughter goes into early labor.
Vintage Miller (While I Was Gone, 1998, etc.): a quiet, subtle story of longing, loss, and the compensations that, surprisingly, satisfy and endure.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2001
ISBN: 0-375-41094-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2001
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
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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