Ellis’s third seriocomic novel (Platitudes, 1988; Home Repairs, 1993), this about a con-man/cult leader/motivational speaker whose provenance goes back to Lewis’s Elmer Gantry. Dreadlocked black playboy/inspirationalist Ashton Robinson, a master of paid promotional TV, decides to describe his career on about four dozen microcassette audiotapes. After they—re discovered under a joshua tree in the Mojave Desert by a deputy sheriff—and after two segments of 60 Minutes have aired, devoted to them—we also get —em straight from the horse’s mouth. Some of the novel has Ashton addressing his Personal Empowerment Systems seminars and getting his followers to rise from losers to winners, as he himself has done, although he’s still a loser deep inside (and is still rising above it). “We are either who we are afraid we are, or who we hope to be,” he offers mildly. Ellis’s device here is to preach to the reader with airheaded half-truths that seem merely semi- sensible. Yet Ashton’s speeches leave you, as with his brighter students, walking around in figurative circles and leaking excelsior. The first 60 Minutes segment paints him as a rather charming millionaire rogue. Then Ashton, hooked on a wildly dizzying cough syrup, is visited at home by Mudamenta, a Brazilian midget who shape-shifts into a beautiful woman (and sleeps with him). As a result of Mudamenta’s influence, Ashton gets religion, right here, right now, and decides to change his pitch, marketing something like a scientific religion or system he calls axe (after an Afro-Brazilian word meaning “spirit”) that’s reminiscent of L. Ron Hubbard’s Scientology. He also stocks a wine cellar with red cough syrup and has sex with his female followers before retribution arrives. Many amusing scenes for Ellis’s faithful, but no match for Sinclair Lewis.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-684-84592-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1998
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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