Bakopoulos doesn’t make a single wrong move, seamlessly integrating the magic-realism elements into the rest. A dazzling...
Where have all the fathers gone?
That’s the question in this marvelous first novel. It’s 1991 in Maple Rock, a white ethnic Catholic suburb of Detroit. Narrator Michael Smolij is 16 when his uncle disappears, and then his father, an unemployed draftsman. A shoe-store owner leaves a note: “I’m going to the moon.” A few dozen more family men leave, never to return. Michael’s cousin Nick thinks they may be hiding out in an old hunting cabin, but the cabin’s empty, and it becomes an article of faith among the no-nonsense teenagers that their fathers have gone to the moon, a change of address as real as beer or pizza. Overnight, the boys become men, taking after-school jobs, throwing back vodka shots, having sex like there’s no tomorrow. In actuality, they are consumed by grief and rage. Michael’s kid brother, Kolya, acts up in school and is put on Ritalin; “Miserable Mikey” struggles with depression. The story sees these ultimate deadbeat dads through a scrim of magic and superstition, their disappearance signaling that life is a series of trapdoors, that there’s no permanence, neither in jobs nor in dads. Michael slowly makes a life for himself, getting a job at the new mall along with his buddies and falling in love with a sexy coworker who’s a single parent, victim of another deadbeat dad. Yet for every gain, there’s a loss: his mother remarries, happily, but leaves their decaying neighborhood; Nick starts his own family but loses his daredevil fire; Kolya develops into a promising athlete but enlists after 9/11. In an eerie reprise of the moon exodus 12 years before, the sons, now fathers themselves, gather spontaneously at their old rendezvous, unsure of their own loyalties.
Bakopoulos doesn’t make a single wrong move, seamlessly integrating the magic-realism elements into the rest. A dazzling debut that’s both earthy and anguished as hope battles despair, with heartbreak always just below the surface.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-15-101135-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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