by William H Goodson III ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 12, 2014
A compassionate, well-written novel with memorable characters and skillfully expressed insights.
A Nebraska girl attending a Midwestern college in the 1960s is taken advantage of by an unscrupulous foreign student, something she takes decades to fully understand.
In Goodson’s novel, one narrator is the nameless blue-eyed girl; the other is Sayiid Algedda, a man from an unnamed Middle Eastern country who comes to America for college. The blue-eyed girl, pretty, naïve and trusting, feels responsible for keeping others happy—like so many girls of her generation. She’s no match for the rich, well-connected and sociopathic Sayiid, who manipulates her into being alone with him and then rapes her. He insists on continuing to see her, controlling her through fear and intimidation. She’s already seen how easily a girl’s life can be ruined through gossip, and diplomatic immunity protects him from arrest. Over the years, Sayiid continues to contact her and her family. It’s not until later in life that she’s able to fully confront her experience. Goodson (It’s Your Body...Ask!, 2000) powerfully conveys the girl’s nightmarish, slow-motion helplessness, more harrowing for the veneer of a normal relationship: “I laughed with Sayiid because I could not get away, and I could not live in a continual state of anger. I smiled to survive,” says the blue-eyed girl. Readers are likely to spend much of the book tense and angry on her behalf, so vividly does Goodson evoke her trapped, shamed cooperation. He makes understandable the cultural and family background that keep her silent and the many ways she was set up—for example, by the professors who “encouraged us to socialize with guys whose culture taught them that a girl by herself was fair game.” While Goodson portrays Sayiid as a villain, not all Middle Eastern men are so depicted; Sayiid’s compatriots are characterized as men of integrity. The sometimes overlong but realistic novel shows the slow process of understanding: “In the movies, the heroine gets angry, toughens up, and kicks ass; but in real life, things unfold.” Goodson describes this unfolding well, with a heartening conclusion.
A compassionate, well-written novel with memorable characters and skillfully expressed insights.Pub Date: Feb. 12, 2014
ISBN: 978-0976039822
Page Count: 376
Publisher: Red Square Press
Review Posted Online: March 27, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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BOOK REVIEW
by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951
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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SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2006
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
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