by Thomas Sanchez ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 2, 2003
Florid, not quite Chandler.
Straightforward noir against the backdrop of pre-Revolution Cuba.
It’s New Year’s Eve, and both 1957 and Communism loom in the island’s future. King Bongo, a p.i. when the price is right, is on his way to the Tropicana casino to settle some scores and possibly score a sexy, rare flower. But the casino will blow up before morning, a blast that strikes just as the year turns. After Bongo gives his statement to the police and retires to his office, there’s only a moment before he’s frozen in his tracks by the inevitable click of high heels outside his office that triggers the beginning of noir, albeit a somewhat low-rent variety: “Bongo was immobile, like a fly just zapped by the tongue of an albino lizard.” That’s followed in short order by the appearance of the necessary body, sans legs, arms and head, caught up in a fisherman’s nets. This makes for adequate introduction to the story’s trickster-villain Zapata, the perverted policeman Bongo despises, who likes to fantasize sick poetry and who throws the body into his trunk so that he can tool around town after little girls and find more corpses. The plot takes the typical route—someone disappeared in the blast, the trail leads all the way to the top, Cuba would be better if the Americans weren’t around, and it all comes back to rare flowers in the end—but Sanchez’s (Day of the Bees, 2000, etc.) heart seems tied to weird characters. This is a world populated with the likes of Leaping Larry Lizard, Johnny Payday (“a bald little schmo whose muscles bulged and twitched beneath his discount-store suit”), Broadway Betty (who is liable to break into songs from Oklahoma! at any moment), Sweet Maria (the maid with a mission), and Monkey Shines (“who was born on a street named bitterness, but he was an eternal optimist”).
Florid, not quite Chandler.Pub Date: May 2, 2003
ISBN: 0-679-40696-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2003
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by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951
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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by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2006
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
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