An odd cross between angst-ridden youth memoir and women’s adventure yarn: solipsistic, mildly entertaining.
Television writer Dale whips up a lightweight tale of travel and romance in daunting locales.
After a dutiful, dull youth and a disillusioning first job as a corporate newsletter writer, the author concluded, “I had tried life on, but had yet to grow into it. My life had been a triple-A training bra.” Determined to avoid the fate of her joyless middle-aged colleagues at Hughes Aircraft and inspired by her free-spirited parents’ sudden move to a farm in Honduras, she embarked upon a less responsible, more adventurous course. Initial journeys to Lebanon and Cuba whetted her appetite for experience: “After Beirut, everything around me seemed so trivial.” She got more than she bargained for with two Costa Rican romances, the first with Michel, who was arrested for defrauding her and others, the second with Francisco, a luckless Colombian national who was imprisoned due to trumped-up accusations by his estranged wife. Dale impulsively moved to Costa Rica to be near Francisco, only to find his legal situation worsening. After a nine-month struggle, her efforts aided Francisco at trial; they fled Costa Rica for Panama, Colombia, and further complications, including a scary period of destitution, and Francisco’s eventual betrayal. Dale portrays Central America with colorful generalities, captures the luckless milieu of its prisons, and writes sympathetically about the ordinary people she encountered as her journey grew rockier. Like many television writers moving into books, she hews to a style best described as Mass-Cult American: casually chatty, sprinkled with snide asides, vague sex talk, and inevitable pop-culture references. Her determinedly airy, chipper tone ultimately becomes problematic, since she treats everything she experiences and sees, no matter how grave, as material for sitcom-like riffing. She’s also much too focused on her own woes, as witness this characteristic observation upon seeing the Panama Canal: “How easy it must be to be a ship’s captain, I thought to myself.”
An odd cross between angst-ridden youth memoir and women’s adventure yarn: solipsistic, mildly entertaining.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-609-80983-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Three Rivers/Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2003
This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-100227-4
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An extravaganza in Bemelmans' inimitable vein, but written almost dead pan, with sly, amusing, sometimes biting undertones, breaking through. For Bemelmans was "the man who came to cocktails". And his hostess was Lady Mendl (Elsie de Wolfe), arbiter of American decorating taste over a generation. Lady Mendl was an incredible person,- self-made in proper American tradition on the one hand, for she had been haunted by the poverty of her childhood, and the years of struggle up from its ugliness,- until she became synonymous with the exotic, exquisite, worshipper at beauty's whrine. Bemelmans draws a portrait in extremes, through apt descriptions, through hilarious anecdote, through surprisingly sympathetic and understanding bits of appreciation. The scene shifts from Hollywood to the home she loved the best in Versailles. One meets in passing a vast roster of famous figures of the international and artistic set. And always one feels Bemelmans, slightly offstage, observing, recording, commenting, illustrated.
Pub Date: Feb. 23, 1955
ISBN: 0670717797
Page Count: -
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1955
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