A little high-minded but, in the main, thoroughly enjoyable hokum.
Historical romance debut with a superabundance of plot twists and psychological turns,
In the Regency England of 1819, six-year-old Colin Fraser is stolen from his home and made the bargaining chip of a Spanish zealot named Carevelo, who believes that Colin’s father Charles, a rising young politician of means, possesses the Carevelo family ring that Carevelo needs to fight the Spanish monarchy. While the police search for Colin, Charles and his beautiful wife Mélanie look for the ring. Seven years earlier, during the French occupation of Spain, Charles had led a British expedition into the Spanish mountains to secure the piece of jewelry, but it was lost after an ambush by the French. While in the mountains, Charles met Mélanie, a young half-Spanish/half-French anti-Bonapartist noblewoman running from French soldiers who had raped her and murdered her family. Charles married Mélanie and has raised and loved Colin, the child she was carrying, as his own. But the kidnapping forces Mélanie to admit to Charles the lies that their marriage was based on: She was actually a spy, not a noblewoman, and Colin’s father was not a rapist but her spy master, Raoul O’Roarke. Coincidentally (or not), O’Roarke knew Charles years earlier and had once given him a copy of Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man. Charles, whose liberal ideals and feminist sympathies are remarkable, to say the least, reacts to his wife’s confessions with understandable fury at first, then begins considering his own deceptions. The combination of literary allusions and psychological self-examination gets pretty thick at times. As the two close in on the ring’s mystery, Mélanie is stabbed and Charles shot: clearly, someone wants to stop their search. But Charles and Mélanie are determined to save their son, and their marriage.
A little high-minded but, in the main, thoroughly enjoyable hokum.Pub Date: April 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-06-621133-6
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2002
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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