Prequel to Green’s Shadow of Ashland (1996) and immensely superior to it. Shadow told of a brother, Jack Radey, who disappears from Toronto during the Depression and for 50 years is not seen again. Then 50-year-old letters from him begin to arrive; a visit to Ashland, Kentucky, brings up his ghost; and still more letters arrive. Such surrealism takes place here again, with the narrator dying and turning into a black starling who sits on phone wires with other starlings and watches his family members grow and die, observing the deaths of others as well, including those in great fires and maritime disasters. We watch a century of Radeys pass through life; know their houses by street and number; their jobs in a variety of Toronto businesses; their illnesses, children, weddings, death notices, funerals. Martin Radey himself is born into a Toronto family with ten sisters and two brothers. His mother dies relatively young. He stays single until his late 20s, when, after a beautiful courtship, he marries a suffragette and has two children (one is Jack, now the focus of the story). Martin has spent his adult life in the receiving department of Don Valley Pressed Bricks and Terra Cotta, and when his young wife dies suddenly, he is left knowing nothing about raising children. A second wife dies of septicemia; Martin goes to live with her sister and mother, then they die; and, finally, his brother Mike has seven children who marry, have children, and die. The entire Radey family, it seems, is a huge flock of starlings, all dead by novel’s end, largely of natural causes. A phenomenal idea, like applying the detail of Joyce’s Dublin or the techniques of Dos Passos’s USA to a single family.
Pub Date: April 22, 1999
ISBN: 0-312-86672-0
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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