Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Zindel, Paul (Vol. 26) - Isabel Quigly

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ISABEL QUIGLY

Like the other heroes of Paul Zindel's books [Chris Boyd, hero of Confessions of a Teenage Baboon], can explain, in language that comes convincingly from a sixteen-year-old, what the bizarre circumstances of his life have brought him to. His mother is a kleptomaniac nurse who takes him round to her patients' houses when she's hired. In between jobs they live out of two suitcases and three shopping bags in a rundown rooming house called the Ritz Hotel. So, no home, no stability, and—since he ran off when Chris was five and then died—no father. Chris's baboonery strikes no one till he and his mother land up looking after an apparently sweet old lady with an apparently alcoholic, violent son of thirty called Lloyd. The sweet old lady turns out to have some odd habits (such as biting people) and her son some socially suspect attitudes and ways of behaving. But he does seem to care that Chris is being crushed by his mother and is lonely,...

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1. Introduction
2. Diane Farrell
3. Zena Sutherland
4. The Times Literary Supplement
5. Marilyn R. Singer
6. John Rowe Townsend
7. Diane Gersoni-Edelman
8. The Times Literary Supplement
9. Mary Silva Cosgrave
10. Zena Sutherland
11. BEVERLY A. HALEY and KENNETH L. DONELSON
12. Isabel Quigly
13. Zena Sutherland
14. Isabel Quigly
15. Stanley Hoffman
16. Joyce Milton
17. Maxine Fisher
18. Jack Forman
19. Cyrisse Jaffee
20. Sally Holmes Holtze
21. Peter Fanning
22. David Rees
23. Paxton Davis
24. Judith N. Mitchell
25. Margery Fisher
26. A. Thatcher
27. Copyright

1. Paul Zindel