There seems never to be a question as to whether or not a new Lanny Budd novel will sell. It will. This one has the familiar ingredients:- full quota of yesterday's headlines served up with applesauce, as the intrepid Superman, Lanny Budd, playboy of Europe's capitals, expert on art, friend of Nazi sympathizers, and- in reality- F.D.R.'s "presidential agent"- uses all this as front for investigation under the actuality of wartorn Europe. This panel in his adventures starts with an interview in Vicky France with Laval and ends with an interview in Moscow under siege with Stalin- the span, 1940 to 1948. He continues his hazardous career, with one crack in the armor when he is virtually booted from Britain as suspect; he even trains intensively under Prof. Einstein so that he may enter Nazi Germany once again and extract some secrets of atomic investigation and bring them back to America; he takes an enforced six months' furlough as a result of a plane crash; and he solves his "to do or not to do" emotional tangles by having fate dispose neatly of the insistent Lizbeth, leaving him with Laurel in Hongkong, and marriage as the answer to the problem of their escape. One finishes the 700 pages wondering anew at Upton Sinclair's facility in spinning a plot from hackneyed thread, dated colloquialisms and cliches — and making it incontrovertibly readable- and saleable.
Pub Date: May 24, 1946
ISBN: 1934568627
Page Count: 654
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: April 11, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1946
BOOK REVIEW
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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