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
Hilderbrand’s portrait of the upper-crust Tate clan through the years is so deliciously addictive that it will be the “It”...
Queen of the summer novel—how could she not be, with all her stories set on an island—Hilderbrand delivers a beguiling ninth (The Castaways, 2009, etc.), featuring romance and mystery on isolated Tuckernuck Island.
The Tate family has had a house on Tuckernuck (just off the coast of swanky Nantucket) for generations. It has been empty for years, but now Birdie wants to spend a quiet mother-daughter week there with Chess before Chess’s wedding to Michael Morgan. Then the unthinkable happens—perfect Chess (beautiful, rich, well-bred food editor of Glamorous Home) dumps the equally perfect Michael. She quits her job, leaves her New York apartment for Birdie’s home in New Canaan, and all without explanation. Then the unraveling continues: Michael dies in a rock-climbing accident, leaving Chess not quite a widow, but devastated, guilty, unreachable in the shell of herself. Birdie invites her younger daughter Tate (a pretty, naïve computer genius) and her own bohemian sister India, whose husband, world-renowned sculptor Bill Bishop, killed himself years ago, to Tuckernuck for the month of July, in the hopes that the three of them can break through to Chess. Hunky Barrett Lee is their caretaker, coming from Nantucket twice a day to bring groceries and take away laundry (idyllic Tuckernuck is remote—no phone, no hot water, no ferry) as he’s also inspiring renewed lust in Tate, who has had a crush on him since she was a kid. The author jumps between the four women—Tate and her blossoming relationship with Barrett, India and her relationship with Lula Simpson, a painter at the Academy where India is a curator, Birdie, who is surprised by the recent kindnesses of ex-husband Grant, and finally Chess, who in her journal is uncoiling the sordid, sad circumstances of her break with normal life and Michael’s death.
Hilderbrand’s portrait of the upper-crust Tate clan through the years is so deliciously addictive that it will be the “It” beach book of the summer.Pub Date: July 6, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-316-04387-8
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Reagan Arthur/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2010
This is the sort of book that stirs one so deeply that it is almost impossible to attempt to convey the impression it leaves. It is the story of today's Exodus, of America's great trek, as the hordes of dispossessed tenant farmers from the dust bowl turn their hopes to the promised land of California's fertile valleys. The story of one family, with the "hangers-on" that the great heart of extreme poverty sometimes collects, but in that story is symbolized the saga of a movement in which society is before the bar. What an indictment of a system — what an indictment of want and poverty in the land of plenty! There is flash after flash of unforgettable pictures, sharply etched with that restraint and power of pen that singles Steinbeck out from all his contemporaries. There is anger here, but it is a deep and disciplined passion, of a man who speaks out of the mind and heart of his knowledge of a people. One feels in reading that so they must think and feel and speak and live. It is an unresolved picture, a record of history still in the making. Not a book for casual reading. Not a book for unregenerate conservative. But a book for everyone whose social conscience is astir — or who is willing to face facts about a segment of American life which is and which must be recognized. Steinbeck is coming into his own. A new and full length novel from his pen is news. Publishers backing with advertising, promotion aids, posters, etc. Sure to be one of the big books of the Spring. First edition limited to half of advance as of March 1st. One half of dealer's orders to be filled with firsts.
Pub Date: April 14, 1939
ISBN: 0143039431
Page Count: 532
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1939
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