|a Prince Frederick, MD : |b Recorded Books, |c 1999. Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.|a Cannery Row |h / |c John Steinbeck. 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. ![]() The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah ( The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. 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. 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 Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. ![]() Julia is shy and brainy Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.Įllie and Julia Cates have never been close. The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. Yanagihara ( The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”-deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. And one feels that to him, too, they are part of the flavor of a folk legend of today.įour men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions-as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer-and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives. But Steinbeck succeeds in making them human, likable, out of drawing but never in caricature. The plot is tenuous, held together by the characters. There's humor - and pathos - and sheer good story telling as the incidents unfold. The story builds up to first one and then another climax, as the boys plan a party for Doc. Lee's felicitous acquiescence to their thinly veiled urging that they become caretakers of his newly acquired shack their neighbors in the deserted lot Doc, high mogul of the marine laboratory, doctor to the neighborhood on occasion, beloved by all and the others who made up the dregs of Cannery Row. Flotsam and jetsam of humanity, - the gang of boys who could get jobs but didn't except when emergency demanded - and then quit when the emergency passed. To be sure, one can strain at his underlying meanings and say that such people should not exist in today's plenty - but no one can argue that they wouldn't exist again tomorrow if eliminated today. Once again, as in Tortilla Flat, he makes no effort to stress "social significance". ![]() I loved it - and to my mind - it fits admirably an immediate need in our season's lists, - the need for a richly patterned story spun out of another layer of that peculiar underworld with which Steinbeck is at his best.
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