Veteran man of letters Rubin (Small Craft Advisory, The Mockingbird in the Gum Tree, both 1991, etc.) offers a tale of love and graft in early 1940s Charleston that's redolent of old novels and faded photographs and no less appealing. The prose is stately, even stilted at times, and the story old-fashioned in its gentility, but the characters Rubin creates and the portrait he draws of his native Charleston are full-fleshed and vivid. Over the course of a year, the war, which will transform the city into a major naval base, is only a distant noise, but already the local congressman and his cronies are busy pursuing profitable if questionable land deals in anticipation of a boomdeals that will be discovered by rookie reporter Mike Quinn, who landed a job on a Charleston newspaper after graduation so he could be near his fiancÇe, Betsy Murray, the daughter of one of the nefarious land developers. While Mike becomes increasingly unhappy with Betsy, who seems to have been using him just to get back her old love, another more successful love story is unfolding on the campus of Charleston College. Here, middle-aged English teacher, bachelor, and new boat-owner Dr. Rosenbaum realizesafter a number of revealing incidents, including a disastrous boat trip to nearby islands to observe turtlesthat he is in love with Sara Jane, the college librarian. The couple marry at Thanksgiving, and not only survive the havoc wreaked by a new faculty appointment at the college but play cupid, too, as they introduce the now-free Mike to the eminently more suitable Polly. A final chapter tells us what happened after the war, a wrap-up that merely enhances the pleasures of the read. Literate period charm: a poignant reminder of what now seems an age of innocence.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1995
ISBN: 1-56352-233-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Longstreet
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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