by Susan R. Sloan ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 25, 2004
Blistering pace weds us to these stereotyped characters for the duration.
Catholic woman chooses homicide over divorce, in a fourth thriller by Sloan (Act of God, 2002, etc.).
In 1955, Valerie O’Connor is a naïve Irish-Catholic girl from a large Vermont household where the punishment, while sometimes corporal, is never unjust, at least in her brainwashed view. Despite her father’s misgivings, she marries Jack Marsh, a Korean War vet with a future in airline mechanics. Jack’s mother died giving birth to him, and his alcoholic father battered a succession of nameless (to Jack) women. Thus Jack won’t want children (though he’ll get them), and women will be interchangeable. The oblivious Valerie suffers through it all. Jack rapes her on their honeymoon, misinterprets her feeble objections, and lashes out each time she announces a pregnancy, twice endangering the fetus. Still, the faith of her fathers won’t permit Val to leave Jack, use birth control, or rat him out over those cracked ribs and life-threatening tumbles. Decades wear on, Jack’s career advances, and his outside women proliferate. The family moves from Seattle to a hamlet south of San Francisco, where Valerie makes friends and gets a waitress job she adores. Jack’s abuse is sporadic, usually due to bourbon-fueled rage at being dumped by yet another mistress turned off by his technique. When his brutishness causes the death of one of his and Valerie’s children, the others plot their escape—and Valerie spends the’70s in a sedative fog, nipping at the bourbon herself. Two sons and a daughter walk the wild side, and another becomes a nun. Youngest son Ricky goes into Witness Protection, leaving Valerie with a grandson to raise—and a second chance. By now, the Marshes are in their 60s, and Val has a successful wedding couture business. Just when some hard-won tranquility settles on their abode, another scourge looms: retirement. The idled Jack returns to bourbon and gets what’s coming to him, about 400 pages too late.
Blistering pace weds us to these stereotyped characters for the duration.Pub Date: Aug. 25, 2004
ISBN: 0-446-53029-8
Page Count: 480
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2004
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BOOK REVIEW
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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SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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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