I loved the unique and odd characters. I hated the ending which left me grieving for days.STORY BRIEF:Karen is divorced with a baby. She is on the run from her ex-husband and moves to Verity, Florida. Twelve-year-old Keith is the meanest boy in town and lives with his divorced mother Lucy. Julian is a policeman who uses dogs for police work. Julian rarely uses words and believes that bees and mosquitoes don’t sting or bite him because he is too ugly. There is a murder. Keith runs off and may be a witness.REVIEWER’S OPINION:This book is fantastic for its unique, odd and mesmerizing characters. I loved reading about these odd people, but as a story, there were too many unanswered questions and too much sadness for me. Throughout the book, too many people lose loved ones. This includes Lucy, who loved and raised Keith. But from the time he was born, Keith never loved Lucy as most children love their mothers, which had the effect of Lucy losing her own child. The worst part of the book was the ending. Someone is about to be killed, a dog saves his life, and then the dog is killed when he didn’t have to be. Two days after reading the book, I was still grieving for the dog. Why must great authors do this? Why do authors want to depress their readers? On balance, I do recommend the book, but only if you think you can handle the sadness at the end.Please see VB's comment at the end of this review for some excellent points.CAUTION SPOILERS:Some of the things I liked about the book follow. I loved Julian’s and Lucy’s odd relationship. I’ve never seen anything like it. They never talked or acknowledged it. Julian always assumed she would leave him because he was ugly or for some other reason. I was intrigued that he was attracted to her because she was lying. I loved the way Julian just looked at the high school yearbook pictures of two people and could tell much about them, and he was right. I loved Julian’s oddities and perception. I loved the relationships between a boy and a baby, and also between the boy and a dog.I did not like that there were so many unanswered questions. Why did Karen leave her husband? What was so bad about him? Why did his parents want the baby so badly? Why was Lucy unhappy with a far away look in her high school yearbook picture? Why did she leave Evan and New York? Why didn’t she and Keith ever get along? Why did Julian decide not to pursue the man who had hired the kidnapper? I assume it was to keep the boy from having to testify. I could be wrong. The story around the character Angel was vague, confusing, and incomplete - especially his interaction with Shannon. That was so confusing that I’m not sure what my questions are. I’d be more willing to accept all the unanswered questions if the ending had been happier.DATA:Story length: 275 pages. Swearing language: moderate to strong. Sexual language: none to mild. Number of sex scenes 2. Total number of sex scene pages: 3. Setting: unspecified time, think 1980s, Florida and New York. Copyright: 1992. Genre: human relationships fiction with mystery and romance.
I really do like Alice Hoffman, I promise! But for some reason the last 3 or 4 books I've read by her were all rather flawed. The writing style is there, but the plots are not. This particular book seems really lacking in solid motivations. Why did Keith take the infant? Why did the police let Keith's mother investigate? How likely is it that Keith's mother and the infant's mother would have come from the same area of the country and that the infant's mother would have admitted to that? And what commercial airline would allow a full grown German Shepherd into the passenger cabin AND would have enough leg room that the dog would have room to lie at the owner's feet? Yeah right. Then for the more spoilery things that bugged me: (view spoiler)[Why on earth would the infant's father risk hiring someone to re-abduct the infant? If he started legal proceedings, there's not a judge in the world that wouldn't have granted him custody. He wouldn't have even had to stretch the truth! He'd just have to say that his wife didn't up for a scheduled visitation and when he showed up personally, she pulled a knife on him and refused the visitation. She never actually TOLD him that she'd seen the driver hit the child, so from his point of view, this is completely unexplained... If she'd been reasonable, she would have called him up, explained and refused to release the child to that particular driver again. On top of the knife, she fled with the child and lived under an assumed identity in a classic example of parental child abduction. What sane judge would ever grant her custody, even in the pro-woman 1980's? Sure, hire an investigator and find her, but then do the rest legally! And I hated the ending. We're supposed to believe that Julian (a cop) allows the infant's father to get away scot-free on his wife's murder, on the premise that he'd spend the rest of his life wondering what happened to his child? But why is that? Once Julian files his false report, he really can't change his story without consequences - and any new story would be under immediate suspicion, since if it was the truth, why wouldn't he have reported it when it happened? So, all the infant's father has to do is wait a year or two, hire a new investigator to find the child, then reclaim custody... Or short of that, hire someone to keep an eye on the kid and report back on how she's doing. So letting the guy go free is really unsatisfying. And now you have an infant that is going to grow up knowing she's loved, but is not going to have any knowledge of her history or of her biological family... Even if you hate the father, she's not going to know her grandparents or aunts, uncles and cousins on either side of the family. And she's probably going to struggle for money when it's obvious that her paternal family is wealthy and would probably pay for college, etc. (hide spoiler)]
Do You like book Turtle Moon (2002)?
This book centers on a small town in Florida that seems to draw single mom's running from their past. They know each other in a superficial way but they keep their secrets to themselves. Until one of them is murdered . . Lucy's young, troubled son Keith (12 going on 18) turns up missing, along with the murdered woman's baby. This brings her closer to officer Julian who is a bit of an enigma. He believes he's ugly and relates better to his canine companions than to people. If this were written by another author I'd expect the two to track down the missing kids and fall into a blissfull love affair but it's a Hoffmann novel and her stories are more complicated and melancholy.This book, like the others I've read by Hoffmann, focuses more on its offbeat characters than it does it's mystery and that's fine by me. It's bittersweet and doesn't go where you expect it too.
—Bark's Book Nonsense
While this book was beautifully written, I think my heart is too tender right now to read about a baby the same age as my daughter- violently losing her mother and being rescued by a young boy and being fed stale donuts. The whole thing just had me hugging my daughter tighter and hoping she never experiences that kind of loss in her life. I loved the book, I thought it was descriptive and the characters were real and quirky. Another excellent Alice Hoffman book!
—Rebecca
I recently re-read this book and liked it even better the second time. In Verity, Florida there seems to be a lot of women who are running away from ex-husbands and unhappy lives. One of these is the mysterious Karen and her sweet, happy baby. Another is Lucy who has left an unfulfilling marriage in New York and brought with her a 12 year old son, Keith, who is perfectly miserable. But everything changes when Karen is mysteriously murdered and Keith runs away with the baby in an attempt to protect her from her mother's killer.Into the mix comes Julian Cash, a K-9 policeman with 2 huge, skilled dogs, Arrow and Loretta. Julian is a quiet, reclusive man with a troubled past. Abandoned by his mother at birth he was raised by a wonderful woman who could see through his anger and his hurt and helped him to become a man of integrity. Julian has always been ashamed of his ugliness, including the scar across his forehead from an accident when he was seventeen and crashed his car into a tree, killing his cousin in the passenger seat. But as he searches for Keith and the baby he and Lucy develop confusing but powerful feelings.I loved this book for its complexity of emotions and I loved Julian even more the second time than the first.
—Kathleen Valentine
