It’s a mess and offers little relief from the dreary solipsism that is the novel’s hallmark.
With this fourth stand-alone volume, Kennedy’s Copenhagen Quartet draws to a desultory close.
Bluett, the protagonist, has much in common with the Kerrigan of Kerrigan in Copenhagen (2013), this novel’s predecessor. Both are Irish-American expats, long resident in the Danish capital. Both put away impressive amounts of alcohol. Kerrigan was a writer; Bluett is a translator of catalogs and such. Now 43, a young Bluett came to Copenhagen because it was a haven for jazz cats. Miles, Bird, Trane: These are Bluett’s gods. (It’s a shame the music’s energy doesn’t infuse this account of his life.) A young man’s passion also propelled him into marrying the Danish Jette. The marriage soon soured, but it did produce a boy and a girl, Bluett’s treasures, now grown and at university. Bluett’s divorce a year ago, in 1996, liberated him, yet he’s a lonely guy, at loose ends. His only friend is his neighbor Sam, another American translator. He likes Denmark, appreciates the generous welfare benefits, but is it really his home? Danes still seem cool, distant, unknowable. Kerrigan profiled the city as a rich cultural repository, proud of the legacy of Andersen and Kierkegaard. By contrast, this is a one-dimensional work focused on Bluett’s love life, which is all stumbles. He rekindles a relationship with an old flame only to ruin it through his arrogant inattentiveness, which he can't acknowledge. Then Kennedy whips up some melodrama. Sam’s son finds him dead, a suicide after a cancer diagnosis. No, wait, that diagnosis never happened. Sam had left his assets to a Russian “dancer” at a clip joint who had bewitched him. Murder, then? But there’s no police investigation, and all Bluett’s sleuthing earns him is some cracked ribs.
It’s a mess and offers little relief from the dreary solipsism that is the novel’s hallmark.Pub Date: Aug. 5, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-62040-141-5
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: June 14, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2014
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
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