A depressing read, despite an ending that offers some triumph.
In Blanchard’s (Mourning Doves After the Fire, 2010) fantasy novel, a large rat colony is ruled by a good king until a rat soldier usurps power and the city hires exterminators.
“Life for the rats was always futile and wretched—an endless pursuit of something to eat.” That’s the case for even the best-run, safest refuges, such as the abandoned movie palace where Indio—a blind mole rat—has long ruled his huge colony. Most rats live only a few years but Indio is 30, giving him wisdom and experience in making rules, handling disputes, giving advice, and assigning punishments for sins such as shirking forage duties. Indio’s soldier rats provide enforcement; one is the high-ranking, ambitious Matthias. He dislikes Nicholas, Indio’s son and heir, and is determined to rule the colony himself someday, even though Hildegard, a fortuneteller rat, has warned him that he won’t live long. Matthias prepares an elaborate plan to surreptitiously eliminate the heir, which succeeds brilliantly; the unsuspecting Indio decides to make Matthias his new heir and guardian until Maxwell, his younger son, comes of age. Matthias repays his king by shoving him into an overflowing sewer, then taking over the colony and imposing draconian rules while ignoring duller responsibilities. He enjoys assigning punishments, though, including the most horrifying: being stuck to flypaper for three days. Soon the city goes to war against rats, giving the colony new survival challenges. Blanchard’s overcrowded animal colony ruled by an iron paw owes an obvious debt to the 1972 novel Watership Down by Richard Adams, to whom the book is dedicated. Like that author, he understands his characters as animals bound by their animal natures, which is a plus for the book as a whole. Blanchard has a harder task, though, because city rats just don’t have the inherent appeal of Watership Down’s wild rabbits: indeed, the huge colony is more than a little horrifying. The novel acknowledges this, but with scene after scene of brutal, bloody, meaningless deaths, Blanchard perhaps succeeds too well in illustrating the “futile and wretched” life of rats.
A depressing read, despite an ending that offers some triumph.Pub Date: May 16, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4834-4938-8
Page Count: 338
Publisher: Lulu
Review Posted Online: June 22, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
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
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
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.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
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