STEADY EDDIE

Name: STEADY EDDIE
Author: T. Glen Coughlin
ISBN: 1-56947-221-1

by T. Glen Coughlin ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 2001

Eddie’s an awfully passive protagonist, but Coughlin tells his story with just the right amount of insouciance, bitter...

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Delightfully grungy second novel from Coughlin (The Hero of New York, 1986), a down ’n’ dirty bildungsroman set on Long Island’s grim, hapless, dead-end South Shore, littered with the 1970s detritus of lava lamps, eight-track tape decks, and long nights cruising in muscle cars.

The only child of a dysfunctional family (Dad’s a womanizing pornographer, Mom an alcoholic employee in a laundry), Eddie slices chickens at the local supermarket, working toward the day when he’ll have job security and higher-than-minimum-wage pay as a full-fledged member of the meat-cutters union. At the sour end of a fateful night double-dating with his buddy Loopy, who ferries packages of marijuana and money to New Jersey, Eddie wakes up to find that one of the girls has charged Loopy with rape and named Eddie as an accessory. Of course, our hero is too much of a repressed, guilt-racked 20-something to be guilty, but that doesn’t stop the same local cops who once busted Eddie for stealing coins from parking meters from barging into the meat department and pulling him out in handcuffs. Eddie’s father bails him out, then reveals that Sandra (the girl who cried rape) was turning tricks as a teenager and had posed for a triple-X photo series. Told he can kiss his meat-cutting job goodbye, Eddie retreats to the shelter of a boat his grandfather gave him. Along with is Elena, his date on the night in question, with whom he’s almost falling in love. There’s more trouble on the way, as father and son get into a nasty fight at the local pizzeria and Loopy contemplates marriage to Sandra. But no matter how hopeless, gloomy, or grimy Eddie’s life gets, he learns he can take the bad hand dealt him as long as Elena is by his side.

Eddie’s an awfully passive protagonist, but Coughlin tells his story with just the right amount of insouciance, bitter ironies, and adolescent angst.

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2001

ISBN: 1-56947-221-1

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Soho

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2000

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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MAGIC HOUR

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2006

Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.

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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

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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THE CATCHER IN THE RYE

by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951

A strict report, worthy of sympathy.

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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.