Creating the feeling of a found document, prizewinning Australian writer Woolfe pieces together an intriguing and expansive novel of ideas—showing the ways in which love, motherhood, and mathematics wrap around the human soul. Three generations of Montrose women emerge from the narrative: Hypatia writes of her legendary mother Francis, a gifted and acclaimed mathematician; Francis, in turn, tells the story of her mother, the brilliant, breathtaking Juanita. Meanwhile, Hypatia frequently offers her own narrative in the form of disgruntled letters to Francis, or in in the form of brief biographical commentaries on some of history's great mathematicians. The staggered segments of personal and historical chronology help shape the central story of Francis Montrose, who discovers for the world a whole new kind of number. Having devoted her life to building on the work of Juanita, Francis, a ridiculed amateur, is invited to a mathematics conference in Athens to present her incomprehensible conjectures, which are of ``such fierce, austere beauty, you might think God is real.'' What she is really hoping to give the world is a tribute to her beautiful, aloof mother. Juanita, raised in an Australian convent when her Spanish father was mysteriously assassinated and her mother took to gambling, is a savant, a secret mathematical genius who spends her later married life scribbling groundbreaking theories on scraps of paper. Trapped in a life of domesticity while dreaming of infinity, she pins her hopes on her beautiful son, but it is the plain and ignored Francis who inherits the gift of the abstract mind and becomes obsessed with becoming her mother. As the climax of the story, Hypatia tells of the renowned ``missing days'' when Francis completes her theory on a deserted Greek beach and finally slips out from under the domineering ghost of Juanita. A lovely novel, magical in its elevation of mathematics into a realm of divine beauty, charming in its depiction of the equally demanding sphere of motherhood.
Pub Date: March 27, 1997
ISBN: 0-571-19905-4
Page Count: 420
Publisher: Faber & Faber/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1997
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
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