Leveritt manages a difficult balancing act, using a rollicking and sometimes bawdy tone to examine serious issues of power...
A raucous debut novel of sex and politics set in postwar but still chaotic Sarajevo in the early 21st century.
“Exchange-rate” is a precise term here, for sex becomes a commodity like guns or beer and is used to get information and advantage (and hence power). The situation in Sarajevo in 2002 is, to say the least, free-wheeling, and New Zealander Frito is convinced there is a fortune to be made. He entices his good buddy Bannerman to the city by revealing two aces, as it were, up his sleeve: the possibility of making a killing in the Bosnian beer market and a developing relationship with the intriguing Clare Leischman. In Sarajevo Bannerman immediately meets and is smitten by the beautiful Clare, a Swiss lawyer who’s in the city to prosecute Serbian war criminals, and for a while he agonizes whether to move in on Frito’s girl. Eventually, however, a combination of love and lust helps Bannerman overcome his scruples—though for a while both men share Clare. The machinations of Frito and Bannerman are set against the much more serious back story of sex slavery, male prostitution and institutionalized rape—and the two friends find themselves sucked into this grimmer and more pressing environment. They befriend/rescue Sufi Child from his status as rent boy and get caught up in tracking down Petar Rankovic, a war criminal wanted for crimes against humanity. They’re aided by a motley assortment of UN troops, soldiers of fortune and ne’er-do-wells. Clare, of course, is thrilled, because Rankovic is one of the big fish she’s wanted to haul in front of the war crimes tribunal at The Hague, but his capture becomes more problematic when it turns out other forces might want to pay to have him released.
Leveritt manages a difficult balancing act, using a rollicking and sometimes bawdy tone to examine serious issues of power politics, and he does it brilliantly.Pub Date: April 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4165-9726-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2009
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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