A mourning suburban daughter takes out her grief via murder.
Canadian novelist Cole (The Fearsome Particles, 2006, etc.) generates a bleak satire in his third outing, which falls somewhere between Heathers and The Stepford Wives on the vicious meter. “Everything began when Jean Vale Horemarsh had to look after her mother, Marjorie, who was dying of a terrible cancer in one of the soft organs,” writes Cole in the clinical, eccentric style that characterizes the novel. It seems that the experience of looking after her dying mother has taught suburban potter Jean the true meaning of mercy, after a fashion. And oh how strange the woman’s head can get. She almost pathologically ignores the failings of her marriage to her milquetoast husband Milt, who turns out to be having an affair with a friend, in her quest to ensure that her friends never suffer the indignities of old age. For starters, Jean takes her slutty friend Dorothy out for a night of drinking, skinny-dipping and fooling around with the local lads, before chopping her head off with a dull shovel. No less bizarre is Jean’s lesbian liaison (“a little unexpected”) with a college chum, ending with a poison-inducing back rub. For all its gruesomeness, there are reasons behind Jean’s obsession, and the creepiest scenes are in fact outclassed by the book’s more disquieting pauses. Among these disturbances is a flashback to Jean’s childhood, during which she methodically drowns all of her stuffed animals in response to her mother’s euthanasia of a litter of puppies, and a quiet interlude at a park where Jean shuffles her friends’ names about on slips of paper, trying to elect her first victim based on her affections. A shudder-inducing satire that meditates more on the dysfunctions of the living than on the tragedies of the dead.
Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-06-208250-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
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
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