Not likely to replace the great midcentury mope, but pleasant enough to be a respectable candidate for book groups.
A hyperimaginative Catholic schoolgirl channels Holden Caulfield as her suburban Cleveland family’s considerable fortunes decline.
It’s later in the century than it was in The Catcher in the Rye, the setting is the Midwest rather than Manhattan, the heroine lives with her large family in a big comfortable house, and the mood is rather more upbeat, but first-timer Reed owes plenty to America’s most reclusive chronicler of upper-middle-class teen angst. The head of brainy and boyish Boyce (“Zuzu” to her adman father, after the daughter in It’s a Wonderful Life) is not impressed by the luxuries of the awfully nice Shaker Heights mansion donated to the family by a fond grandfather. There are Tensions. Religion, for one. Mum is Catholic, really Catholic. Organized-family-novenas-after-breakfast Catholic. Pray-for-the-conversion-of-the-excellent-resident-housekeeper-Catholic. But Dad (“Egg Man” to Boyce, for his elaborate metropolitan Easter hunts) is not. In fact, the swell house was dropped on them only after the disapproving paternal and Protestant grandmother departed life. Dad is not only not Catholic, he’s not ambitious, not professionally so, at any rate. He would rather be a writer than commuter, and his rather boozy advertising career isn’t building the capital needed to put five children through Good Schools or maintain the family fleet of Buicks. Boyce, whose conscience was rattled by the municipal poverty she saw on one of the annual egg hunts, has been taken on as a soulmate by Mary Parker, the smartest girl in her class, whose bus-driver father puts her outside the social sphere. Mary teaches Boyce the pleasures of obscure cultural references, skipping school, shoplifting, unlimited movies, and riding rapid transit. None of these skills can save Boyce when she exhibits signs of Lust and is shipped off to a boarding school that her father isn’t able to pay for.
Not likely to replace the great midcentury mope, but pleasant enough to be a respectable candidate for book groups.Pub Date: Jan. 11, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-6273-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2004
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
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BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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