by Tom Grimes ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 14, 1995
A near-future novel that depicts with savage glee the economic-driven Armageddon awaiting us: a choreographed, televised race war brought to you by your local sponsors. The author of two baseball-oriented novels (A Stone of the Heart, 1990; Season's End, 1992), Grimes here makes a quantum leap into DeLillo land, taking the usual Blade Runner vision of our world in a few years' timeincome disparity a gulf, the streets a battlefieldand casting it in the poetry of direct marketing. For most white people in their armored sedans and feudal communities, overspending is the only heroism; for the black and brown ghetto, life revolves around crack and virtual-reality arcades. But then black crackhead Do-Ray, heeding the mysterious rapper Coda, blows away two cops, bringing on rioting and murders that are carried live on XXN-TV. Looking for Do-Ray are Nick, a disinherited louse of a public defender; Julia, a prosecutor with a skinhead 14-year- old son on the lam; and McKuen, a black Vietnam vet detective. As the characters converge, Do-Ray understands that he's been manipulated into taking the fall as the nonexistent Codaa ratings- boosting creation of XXN and its Bill Gateslike, seemingly omniscient chiefand reaches for a vision of love and redemption. Julia and McKuen never find their quarry, but they do find each other. And Nick, pathetic to the end, dies reaching for XXN's brass ring. Grimes hews to his vision and keeps the energy up almost to the last, beginning with opening setpieces that are brilliant, language-fueled riffs, bleakly funny and uncomfortably accurate (``Can't produce jobs, we'll mass-produce criminals,'' says Nick, upon hearing that the police are using the riots as an excuse for mass arrests). The characterizations are a bit thin, but then, this is television. Pungent with the lunatic language of consumer-driven tabloid America, this horrifying prophecy of a book, coming on the heels of the Oklahoma City bombing, seems closer to social commentary than satire.
Pub Date: Aug. 14, 1995
ISBN: 0-393-03789-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1995
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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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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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