Strong, warm, and engaging.
Pop biographer Leigh (Liza, 1993, etc.) switches gears for a richly researched and oddly successful novel about fictional letters between Marilyn and Jackie.
Leigh’s off-the-wall inspiration works largely because she captures the writing voices of these two icons almost pitch-perfectly in nearly every sentence (though Jackie makes a comment or two we might doubt). The correspondence opens way back at the start of Marilyn’s career, just as Jackie marries Jack, who has already bedded the starlet. That’s in 1953: Jack is fresh and young, but both women are even younger (Marilyn by nine years, Jackie by twelve) and have father-hungers for the charismatic senator from Massachusetts. Jackie had libidinous chats with her own dad about his philandering, while orphaned Marilyn never lived with her father but fixated on Clark Gable, kissing a bedside photo of him throughout childhood. The author slyly leads us into the correspondence with letters from Patrice (Patty) Renoir, who was given the whole batch in a sealed Max Factor box a week before Marilyn died. Patty gave Marilyn Brazilian wax jobs on her pubic hair each time she had a tryst coming up with Jack (known to Patty only as “Mr. G.”) because he loved the prepubescent little-girl look. Throughout the correspondence, Leigh peppers each outstanding event or fact with footnotes from the vast Marilyn/Jackie literature, inventing an occasional gossipy confidant or stolidly solemn reference work. The footnotes give the novel a weird reality and make it the best fictional realization of Marilyn since Sam Toperoff’s dead-on Queen of Desire (1992), with impressive sexual understanding.
Strong, warm, and engaging.Pub Date: April 25, 2003
ISBN: 0-312-30368-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2003
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
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