Timid and superficial.
A teacher seduces a senior at a New England prep school.
Ethan Whitley is new at Berkley Academy in rural Massachusetts. The 17-year-old has transferred from California, where his parents are Stanford professors. His mother has cancer and wants to spare him her suffering. Ethan is not a good fit with the rich kids and the jocks, but he strikes up a friendship with Todd Eldon, who seems to have it all: a pretty, sexually experienced girlfriend and a sophisticated, moneyed background (his mother is a popular novelist in New York City). Underneath, however, Todd is as insecure as Ethan. He is attracted to the Californian’s smarts, and his body, for Todd’s sexual preferences are changing; soon he will dump his girlfriend and make advances toward Ethan, who’s not interested; he’s a virgin, but resolutely straight. Complicating the picture is 36-year-old Hannah McClellan, an English teacher who on the side bakes desserts for the local tearoom. In his second novel (The Trouble Boy, 2004), London-born Dolby tells two coming-of-age stories (one would have been enough) while focusing on teacher-student infatuation, a story line that stretches back to the 1953 Broadway hit Tea and Sympathy. Hannah likes them young and guess what, so did the school’s female founder, who also seduced a 17-year-old. Though sex is the core of the novel, Dolby is reticent about the details, deflecting attention to Hannah’s lurid past in Paris, where she made out with her stepson (her French husband had been cheating on her); the affair ended with the kid’s suicide. Nothing so melodramatic happens this time, though when Ethan tries to extricate himself from her suffocating intensity, Hannah uses her wiles to keep him, even faking pregnancy. When it’s clear not even her scrumptious blueberry cobbler will work, she abruptly leaves the school and is not heard from again, allowing Ethan to start over at Yale. Can healing and closure be far behind?
Timid and superficial.Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-7582-2258-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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