This book’s spirituality is a bit thick, but its snazzy legal high jinks make for an entertaining read.
A sublime lawyer tutors two lousy younger attorneys on cutthroat courtroom tactics and spiritual uplift in this legal dramedy.
Mace Spinella and Brick Hawthorne are former door-to-door perfume salesmen, newly minted grads of a Texas law school, and eternally self-pitying losers facing eviction from their Austin apartment. Desperate for rent money, Mace literally chases an ambulance while Brick attempts a slip-and-fall insurance scam, and both schemes fail miserably. Just before they’re arrested for bribery, they get whisked away by an older lawyer with the name of Ike Turner and the look of Kris Kristofferson. Ike is a font of grizzled scorn—“You don’t even deserve the label greenhorn,” he says. “You’re green bananas…junior shysters”—and paternal life-lessons, the latter sometimes delivered in the form of elaborate bets that seem like sure things to the unwary. He tosses Mace and Brick a couple of throwaway cases involving prostitution and drug possession, and he makes the resulting trials a grand seminar in legal procedure, from voir dire to cross-examination (“If you make it look like you’re having to coax it out of him, it makes him look like he’s being less than forthright,” he tells them). But during a trial, Ike teaches that lawyerly ploys are far less important than a deep connection with one’s soul, gained through prayer and breathing techniques (“I inhale flexibility, trust, and freedom. I exhale rigidity, fear, and resistance”). Feazell’s saga is a lively, if ungainly, mix of clashing elements. Crass courtroom maneuvering mixes with earnest therapy-speak: “When pride and willfulness are finally identified and surrendered, true character development and spiritual transformation can take place.” Marijuana is an overbearing presence, conveyed both in the third-person narrative voice—“Scientific studies have shown marijuana is a cure for cancer, and that it helps with Alzheimer’s, autism, Crohn’s disease, glaucoma, migraines, seizures, and even restless leg syndrome, to name a few”—and those of Mace and Brick during their shapeless interludes of stoned palaver. Feazell is a lawyer, and the story comes alive during his fascinating scenes of courtroom strategizing and during his insightful soapboxing on the burdens that the legal system imposes on the poor. Ike, meanwhile, is a charismatic figure that readers will hope to see more of in subsequent installments of the series.
This book’s spirituality is a bit thick, but its snazzy legal high jinks make for an entertaining read.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-615-97462-0
Page Count: 368
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Sept. 2, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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