The young author’s prose displays a reckless energy and clever turns of phrase that bode well for future work, but this...
The 20-year-old Jong-Fast (daughter of Erica Jong and Jonathan Fast) makes her literary debut with more style than substance in this slim novel about the travails of a privileged, seriously addicted young woman making the scene in New York’s kiddy society.
Convinced she murdered her boyfriend with an air-bubble in his syringe, Miranda Woke, a tediously decadent 19-year-old who’s been mentioned 16 times on the New York Post’s gossipy “Page Six,” arrives at his funeral with claws bared. She casts a jaundiced eye at the well-heeled mourners on their cell phones, describes their reprehensible and scandalous habits in great detail, and keenly observes their sagging and surgically enhanced flesh clothed in the latest name-brands. Her friend Janice retires to the bathroom to fix heroin; Miranda joins her to snort some cocaine; and so it goes. She has famous, much-married parents who don’t love her, and she in turn doesn’t love anybody, especially not the one person in her life who seems to care at all: ex-boyfriend Brett. Brett is a “Five Towns Jew” who was born to be a podiatrist but instead covers mattresses with frosting and calls himself an artist. Miranda, however, has only one goal: to stay high and in denial (though she does have a typical trust-fund job in an art gallery), and, toward that end, she ingests gallons of vodka, along with a laundry list of illegal substances and prescribed psychotropic drugs that make their way to her from places ranging from tony Greenwich, Connecticut, to the sidewalks of Soho. Will this girl come to her senses in time to save herself? And just how much of Miranda Woke is Jong-Fast? Unfortunately, the second question is more interesting than the first.
The young author’s prose displays a reckless energy and clever turns of phrase that bode well for future work, but this first attempt is cartoonish, derivative, and immeasurably too familiar.Pub Date: June 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-50281-5
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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