A haunting and undeniably powerful work marred by its own excesses.
Sexual abuse, incest, pansexualism, and Native American spirituality—explored so well by Spanbauer in the cult favorite The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon (1991)—combine with early–AIDS-era New York for a work that’s utterly fresh but crammed with enough characters, subplots, coincidences, and romances to keep several telenovelas churning for years.
Will Parker may stutter and be both sexually confused and dysfunctional, but he’s a real people magnet. Having escaped provincial Jackson Hole for 1983 Manhattan, he’s not five minutes at LaGuardia before he’s hooked up with Two Shots, a Native American van-driver, and Ruby, his gay male side-kick; in no time they’ve settled Will into his Lower East Side digs and themselves into his life. East Fifth Street is crowded with the requisite New Yorkers of fiction: across the hall is a mad cat-lady, upstairs is Rose, the tough African-American drag queen/performance artist with a heart of gold, and downstairs is the junkie superintendent. Hackneyed types to be sure, but with sharp dialogue and details, Spanbauer infuses them with new life. Waiting tables, Will meets Fiona, a rough-mouthed, Greenwich, Connecticut, would-be artiste who takes Will under her wing and under the sheets. There’s plenty of graphic, although not gratuitous, sex as Will trades experience and love for self-knowledge. As 1983 moves on to ’84 and ’85, AIDS takes over: co-workers die, friends disappear, Rose—now a lover of Will’s—sickens, Fiona’s two brothers die. The slow slide into the world of the epidemic, with its sense of unreality and despair, has never been better realized. But there’s too much more going on here: a murder, a squatters’ riot in a local park, cultural repatriation, and Elizabeth Taylor, arriving for a slow dance with her best friend Rose. Will’s occasional and abrupt flights into magical realism only serve to make the story—already saddled with superfluous, undisciplined subplots—feel more out of control.
A haunting and undeniably powerful work marred by its own excesses.Pub Date: June 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-8021-1691-4
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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