The author of Flying Lessons (1991) offers a superficially old-fashioned story—about an Australian boy who ``would grow up to look into the eyes of a king''—made agreeably contemporary by modish conventions of style and intent. From the moment baby Billy Hayes, the youngest of Sapphire Hayes's children and the closest to her heart, ``knew the shock and joy of being alive in mid-air,'' the course of his future was determined. Born in Australia in the midst of WW I, Billy enjoys a blissful childhood until his father, wounded and embittered, returns from Europe. As Sapphire continues to make excuses for her husband's cruel treatment of the children (to ``acknowledge Jack Hayes as he truly was would mean admitting that she had chosen the wrong man''), Billy becomes the butt of his father's temper. Aware of his athletic potential, however, Billy also begins to set himself physical tests. A chance encounter with year-older Reginald Tsang, the son of a Chinese family of professional tumblers, soon focuses Billy's ambitions and talents. Like any good Victorian hero, Billy must endure a testing of character, and this he does- -triumphantly—as his father in the midst of the Depression sells him, Billy, now an accomplished gymnast, to a couple of traveling tumblers, who abruptly take Billy from his beloved mother and native Australia to England, where he becomes part of their increasingly popular act. At home only in the air, Billy becomes a star, performs in front of royalty, marries cold Bubbles, who divorces him soon after son Michael is born, then must change careers as variety shows are replaced by television. But just as Billy, reunited with a childhood love, is filled with a sense of being blessed with a ``talent that had brought him immeasurable joy,'' modernism intervenes: there will be no happy ending. Not, in the end, your average hero, or your average story, as Johnson movingly celebrates the resilience of the human spirit.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-571-16957-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Faber & Faber/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1993
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
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