The new world order as family romance—this starring a Russian ÇmigrÇ's son who struggles to honor both of his parents while keeping a step ahead of the double agents on his trail. Deep in the Moscow vaults, a faceless bureaucrat rifles through the records of a crumbling empire and abstracts The Papers that will bring governments on both sides of the cold war crashing down—then takes off for London, where his plans to sell them are cut off by his death outside the home of the vanished Yekaterina Bell, whose son Edward promptly goes in search of her—and, he hopes, his father, a mathematician who long ago disappeared back inside the USSR and was reported dead. ``Russians, Americans, British—they all wanted a chat with Mother, and therefore a chat with me too,'' says Bell, who's suddenly getting a lot more attention than he'd like. Routine cloak- and-dagger stuff so far; but Bell looking for his parents (in Paris, Berlin, and inevitably Moscow) is like Achilles chasing the tortoise: the closer he gets, the more they seem to recede from him in a welter of flashbacks. We see Bell years past picking up rumors that his father is still alive; Bell reminiscing about contacts and go-betweens who keep turning up dead; Bell getting recruited during a student trip to Russia by his treacherous teacher/lover Irina Semyonova, who gives him a painful glimpse of his cancer-stricken father and whispers about the drug therapy his cooperation can buy. In the end, thanks to an unsurprising final revelation, Bell will have to choose between his two parents and live with the consequences of the quest he'd been so eager to undertake. As densely, dourly textured as Saviour's Gate (1991) and The Memory Church (1992)—the gloomiest possible view of the ``rapprochement'' between East and West.
Pub Date: March 24, 1994
ISBN: 0-688-11448-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1994
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
BOOK REVIEW
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