More in the tradition of Dynasty than The Forsythe Saga—but readable and fresh all the same.
A debut about a young Indian woman’s tangled relations with a wealthy white family.
Rachel Winnapee learned to fend for herself at an early age. Abandoned by her parents, she was raised first by her grandmother, then by the nuns who took her into their orphanage after her grandmother died. At 16, she was hired (“as a charity”) by the wealthy St. Louis Catholic Lydia March to work as a housemaid in the family’s Michigan summer home. The Marches were not a particularly happy bunch that summer: Their elder son Lipscott had recently died in WWII, and their other boy Woody had just returned from his own service in the Pacific minus a leg. Rachel is soon pressed into service as a kind of unofficial therapist for Woody, who is too traumatized by his brother’s death to care much about putting his own life back into order. Eventually Woody and she fall in love, and Rachel becomes pregnant with Woody’s child. The charitable Mrs. March finds a couple of elderly spinsters to take Rachel in until the baby is born—but Rachel refuses to give the boy up for adoption. She raises him Ben on her own and tries to put Woody (who never answered her letters) out of her mind. When she and Woody meet again, 11 years later, Woody (now married with a son of his own) shocks Rachel by telling her that he knew nothing of Ben and had been told that Rachel ran away. Woody makes arrangements (just in time, as it turns out) to recognize Ben as his legal heir. But can the will hold up in court? Lydia March is not a woman to mess around with—though she may have met her match in Rachel.
More in the tradition of Dynasty than The Forsythe Saga—but readable and fresh all the same.Pub Date: June 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-06-054266-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2003
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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