A soused black sheep goes home to repair frayed family ties in Arrants’ debut novel.
James Nichelson, second son of a publishing dynasty, is a budding writer who finds his soul mate in fetching young painter Bren; feeling that their creative potential can never thrive in moneyed Hilton Head, S.C., they plan to decamp for New York. Alas, Bren gets a professorship at a local university, which precipitates a colossal rift that is briefly and unwisely bridged during a tryst on the eve of Bren’s wedding to James’ bossy older brother, Jonathan. James spends the next few years in Manhattan squalor, working in the Dantean circle of a bar called the Free-fall Club and nursing an epic snit against Bren, Jonathan and the world, unappeased by the no-strings-attached sexual ministrations of a gorgeous, possibly transsexual barmaid named Crystal. He vents his spleen in an unpublished novel and in endless barroom tirades that develop a local following, with Crystal keeping count of his favorite obscenity—rhymes with yuck—on a gong. (Unfortunately, this gong eggs on his rants rather than ushering him off the stage.) Called back by his parents’ deaths, James ensconces himself at the family retreat at Echo Mountain, a bucolic setting tailor-made for nonstop drinking, writer’s block and boozy recriminations. Can further tragedy reunite him with Bren, Jonathan, a cute little girl of questionable parentage and his muse? In telling this swollen saga, Arrants proves himself a talented but fantastically undisciplined and self-indulgent writer. His padded-out prose lurches between cynicism, sentimentality and cloying sex banter, all belabored at unseemly length and volume and badly decorated with song lyrics. James’ loud, profane, sarcastic soliloquies, omnipresent because he is protagonist and narrator, can be vigorous and beguiling in their cocky Southernism, but they are so longwinded that they suck the air out of the novel. A colorful but bloated and exhausting tale of a man swimming through alcohol toward maturity.
Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2011
ISBN: 978-1461024729
Page Count: 712
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2012
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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