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The Troubleseeker

Name: The Troubleseeker
Author: Alan Lessik
ISBN: 978-1-937627-27-0

by Alan Lessik ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 22, 2016

A handsome but tormented Cuban man finds both joy and hardship in this operatic novel.

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Olympian and Santería mythologies merge in this international romance.

Lessik’s debut novel has just about everything: love, identity, politics, the politics of identity, heartbreak, mythical overtones, and innumerable gods in the machine. Antinio grows up in a Cuba that is unapologetically militant (whereas he is peaceful), irreligious (where he is polytheistic), and macho (while he is gay). He has advantages too: he’s winsome, muscular, quick to learn foreign tongues, and has a very big pinga. He first comes to enjoy sex with boys at a military encampment during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. After he’s raped by one of the more vicious boys, he attempts suicide and returns to civilian life. But to be gay is to violate taboo in the Cuba of the ’60s and when Antinio’s affections are revealed, he’s expelled from college and comes to feel himself “lower than a worm.” As an adolescent, Antinio’s favorite book is The Golden Ages, a primer on the gods of Olympus and the heroes they championed. “Antinio saw the similarity between the gods he was studying and the Santería orishas,” various aspects of the godhead’s divinity. Characters in the novel (Calypso, for example, the woman who protects his secrets and gets him readmitted to the university as a linguist) appear with names from Greek mythology, but there is a decided mixing of influence: Calypso, in the book, is also a priestess of Santería. A doctor who tends his fate in a psychiatric ward is named Minos. This is charming, if unsubtle, and the key at the beginning of the work—spelling out the meaning of the characters’ Greek names and what roles they play in the narrative—probably gives the game away a bit too early. But there’s another level to the metaphor: “Antinio and his partners use the terms Greek-active and -passive to describe their sexual behavior.” To be gay was (and is) often to be scorned in America as well, and when the story follows Antinio’s journey to Minnesota as a refugee, and then, later, into illness and suffering, Lessik’s prose is always sympathetic and eloquent.

A handsome but tormented Cuban man finds both joy and hardship in this operatic novel.

Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2016

ISBN: 978-1-937627-27-0

Page Count: 270

Publisher: Chelsea Station Editions

Review Posted Online: July 18, 2016

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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MAGIC HOUR

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2006

Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.

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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

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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by Kristin Hannah

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by Kristin Hannah

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by Kristin Hannah

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THE CATCHER IN THE RYE

by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951

A strict report, worthy of sympathy.

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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.