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THE TALE-TELLERS OF SHORTWATER

Name: THE TALE-TELLERS OF SHORTWATER
Author: C.I. Cameron
ISBN: 978-1468149333

by C.I. Cameron ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 10, 2012

A charming backcountry yarn with quirky characters that could have used a bit more narrative room to breathe.

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In Cameron’s debut novel, a motley group of writers uses storytelling to understand the changes in its isolated desert community.

A big-city engineer, Brian, takes a job with the U.S. Forest Service in rural Oregon. He has high hopes for his relationship with the range manager, Gordon, but he rejects Gordon’s advice to settle his family in the “respectable” town of Blighs Well. Instead, Brian rents a house out in the country, on the other side of Shortwater, a ghost town. Gordon warns that the town will be a “dangerous influence” on Brian’s wife, Honey, and his children. He doesn’t tell Brian that he played an insidious role in Shortwater’s downfall and that he has catastrophic plans for the entire region. The only people who know about Gordon’s past misdeeds are a ragtag group of locals who gather at Peewee’s Mercantile, a run-down general store in Shortwater. This group is working on various writing projects that they began at a long-ago adult education class. As Honey gets to know this group of outcasts, she begins to chafe against the dynamics of her marriage. Meanwhile, her new friends are threatened by a mining project that could ruin the area’s delicate ecosystem. Cameron’s knack for imagery (snowflakes “big as looper moths twirl lazily to earth”) highlights her strong connection to the Oregon landscape. She also uses humor to her advantage, poking gentle fun at planned communities and their rules, as when one character describes the hand-woven ponchos that members of a commune had to wear, even in winter, when the “fringe, front and back, starts to pick up snowballs.” However, the author tries to pack too many images, jokes and plots into a relatively slender book. Her use of very long sentences and her choice to use one of the tale tellers as an omniscient narrator may sometimes cause readers to get lost.

A charming backcountry yarn with quirky characters that could have used a bit more narrative room to breathe.

Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2012

ISBN: 978-1468149333

Page Count: 158

Publisher: CreateSpace

Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2013

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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ANIMAL FARM

A FAIRY STORY

by George Orwell ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 26, 1946

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A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.

Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946

ISBN: 0452277507

Page Count: 114

Publisher: Harcourt, Brace

Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
GEORGE ORWELL
by George Orwell ; edited by Peter Davison

- BOOK REVIEW
DIARIES
by George Orwell & edited by Peter Davison

- BOOK REVIEW
ALL ART IS PROPAGANDA
by George Orwell

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.