An enviably intelligent piece of writing.
Rayfiel’s third novel continues the education of Eve from Colony Girl (1999).
Fifteen-year-old Eve (“No last names in the Bible”) had a kind of sexual education at a lonely religious colony in Iowa—12 families of refugees from the world trying to lead Christian lives. Although Eve wound up working at a strip-joint before she abandoned the colony and headed for Manhattan, she left as a virgin. Now 17, she works as a bar-girl at an illegal after-hours tourist trap in Times Square. Rayfiel brilliantly captures her bent attention span and seafoam sensitivity to the sounds and streets of Manhattan (“The streets themselves have that booming emptiness of a shell held to the ear”) at five a.m. as she walks home from work and sees what seems to be a couple having standup sex on the street, which may, however, be rape, and in fact quickly turns to murder. Later that day, Eve gets the only mail she’s ever received, an invitation to a gallery exhibit. Marron, the artist, has photographed her vagina, rented poster space in the subway for a week, and then framed and hung five graffiti-enriched posters as art objects. For 15 minutes at the show, Eve falls in love with tall, handsome Horace, an artist who smells of sandalwood (“the love of my life”), then forgets about him. Later, Horace seeks her out, though Marron has a key to his apartment. Drunk, Eve decides to quit as a barmaid and evolve (“really, to a higher plane of emotional maturity”). The story, in fact, revolves about Eve waiting and wanting to be a woman. Should she marry her boss, Viktor, and help him get his green card? Or find womanhood with Horace in Tuscany? What about the $10,000 she’s offered to help the mentally disturbed woman she saw stab the “rapist”?
An enviably intelligent piece of writing.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45516-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2003
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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