More California whimsy from the author of When Your Lover Leaves... (1980) and Sightings (1987)—this one detailing the misadventures of young Rome Morrison, a college dropout who dreams of becoming a writer, and the eccentric family she hooks up with. ``I live a life of deceit,'' confesses Rome on page one of this sunny tale, and never afterward does she utter so profound a truth. Having quit college and run away from her wealthy Boston home (her father is a famous chef, her mother a recent suicide), she has moved into her best friend's apartment in San Francisco, assuring her roommate that she has a job (though she doesn't) and planning to write novels until she doesn't win the Nobel Prize, since Daddy says no good writers have ever done so. First, though, she needs rent money, so she lands a job as assistant to Wade DeRosa, a young writer with a flourishing modeling career on the side. Rome takes dictation as Wade dictates his morbid play about a family dinner party in which the bad son, ``Dark,'' pretends to poison his mother, while the good son, ``Light,'' attempts to save her. As Wade's own neurotic mother drops in and out of the house, muttering about finding glass shards in her coffee cup, Rome begins to suspect that the play is autobiographical—particularly since Rome currently is tending to an unidentified coma victim in a hospital who precisely resembles Rome's description of his own missing brother. Lo and behold, the coma victim and Wade's brother, Rusty, are one and the same, and as Rome engages in playful affairs with both brothers (and their mother really does die), she must decide which of them is really Light and which is Dark, and which of the two is most appropriate for a young writer to love. Trott indulges in the very pratfalls, flukes of fate, and general playfulness that most novelists avoid, making this prime cult-audience material—for lighthearted eccentrics only.
Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1992
ISBN: 0-88184-754-2
Page Count: 240
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1991
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
SEEN & HEARD
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