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A carregar... All Emergencies, Ring Super (1997)por Ellen Emerson White
   Nenhum(a) Ainda não há conversas na Discussão sobre este livro.  Herenya | Dec 10, 2019 |  sem críticas | adicionar uma crítica
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Dana Coakley has performed off Broadway and achieved some dubious success as the Royal Coffee woman. (Royal Coffee. It'll make anyone feel like a king.) But Dana is not your typical struggling actor. She's not quite sure whether she wants to stay in the business at all, and she doesn't wait tables. Instead, she works as the super for an Upper West Side Manhattan apartment building, spending her days fixing faucets, rolling flat white paint onto innumerable sooty walls, and dragging heavy plastic sacks of trash out to the curb. Dana has just enough time between grouting in 4E and unclogging the sink in 5W to make it uptown to the alternative school for disadvantaged inner-city kids where she tutors in the afternoon. Still, she's not alerting the alumni bulletin just yet. But Dana's life takes an unanticipated turn when she agrees to lend a hand to Travis Williams, one of her students. A few weeks earlier, the Harrison Hotel, a home for low-income families like Travis's and disadvantaged senior citizens, burned to the ground. People were killed - children, a firefighter. It was believed to have been caused by lights on a dried-out Christmas tree. But Travis insists that the place had been torched and Dana is set on the trail of an arsonist. Along the way, Dana will run all over town and into all kinds of people as she tracks her man (her woman, her men, her women, her people?), a search that will take her to an upscale art gallery opening, a fire station full of tough-guy chess players, and face-to-face with a ruthless teenaged drug lord at knife point...and yet she never loses her wry wit or can-do attitude. Não foram encontradas descrições de bibliotecas. |
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 Google Books — A carregar...GénerosSistema Decimal de Melvil (DDC)813.54Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999Classificação da Biblioteca do Congresso dos EUA (LCC)AvaliaçãoMédia: (3.88)
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The first part of this book was curiously lacking in tension. I enjoyed Dana’s interactions with people but some of the bits in between were almost dull. Seriously, can’t White write an interesting book about adults? I wondered --- and then the tension kicked in and things became intensely personal. By the end of the book, I was seriously disappointed that there isn’t a whole series about Dana solving mysteries.
I like that Dana investigates by doing research at the library, making use of her acting abilities and enlisting the support of her friends. Her female friendships are one of the highlights of this book: Molly, a firefighter who is wary new acquaintance; Valerie, a fellow actor who is so cheerfully and unquestioningly willing to get involved; and Peggy, who says things like “Look, it’s your life, you’re free to do something stupid, if you want, but I don’t have to help you.”... yet is willing to go to great lengths for Dana, with Dana.
Several with Dana’s relationships -- most notably with Molly, with Peggy, and with the romantic interest when he eventually turns up -- involve smart, difficult people who are honest with each other and decide it is worth the effort required to build/maintain this relationship. That’s a dynamic I find interesting. And entertaining.
I’m not quite sure what to think of White’s tendency to make things intense and personal by having her main character be physically assaulted and threatened, but the way she writes about the aftermath of trauma is compelling and thoughtful. (Also I appreciate that her heroines are not sexually assaulted.)
In other noteworthy details: Dana has a dog (and also several cats). And I wish there were sequels.
“What are you going to do?” Peggy asked. “Just walk up and accuse him?”
Probably. “Well, I might err slightly on the side of subtlety,” Dana said.
Peggy kept frowning. “Are you familiar with the words ‘slander’ and ‘libel’?”
Oh, please. “Are you familiar with the phrase ‘cocktail party conversation’?” Dana asked. (