From the Brooklyn-based Shakar, a debut collection of stories linked by their location, a fanciful New York City, and by allusions to Ovid's Metamorphoses. In ``Maximum Carnage,'' a sad little girl, Roxanne, becomes a superhero who saves the day at her brutal playground. The author is wonderfully on-key with Roxanne's voice (and he knows all about comic books). In ``The Sky Inside,'' a jumbled, jangly novella, a tough police detective tellingly comments on the decadence of the city, a sculptor leaves behind gigantic letters of the alphabet in some cryptic message, and a down-to-earth astrologer, Madame Merski, calculates when best to give birth. She attracts both the right and wrong men a few hours apart and conceives twins, one of whom is a superhero, having been conceived during a particular alignment of the stars. This is Madame's gift to the city—a hero to save an increasingly endangered place no mere mortal could understand. In the sentimental ``A Million Years From Now,'' a deranged old scavenger constructs his ideal woman out of wire and a fish skeleton; he's still talking to her as emergency workers bear him away. ``City in Love'' concerns a self-absorbed, self-conscious writer living with a woman who has a wonderful idea for a children's story—better, in fact, than the story actually before the reader, which has as its chief virtue a celebration of the sights and sounds of New York. In truth, all of these pieces are infatuated with New York. Once you get past Shakar's Sukenick-like twists and tricks, he's exuberantly in love with the vastness, diversity, and mythic qualities of Manhattan, and his deep affection will undoubtedly inspire him to fashion better books than this one. The apprentice work of a promising talent.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1996
ISBN: 1-57366-023-X
Page Count: 164
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these...
Figuratively and literally shattering moments of hoRRRRRipilication in Chamberlain, Maine where stones fly from the sky rather than from the hands of the villagers (as they did in "The Lottery," although the latter are equal to other forms of persecution).
All beginning when Carrie White discovers a gift with telekinetic powers (later established as a genetic fact), after she menstruates in full ignorance of the process and thinks she is bleeding to death while the other monsters in the high school locker room bait and bully her mercilessly. Carrie is the only child of a fundamentalist freak mother who has brought her up with a concept of sin which no blood of the Lamb can wash clean. In addition to a sympathetic principal and gym teacher, there's one girl who wishes to atone and turns her date for the spring ball over to Carrie who for the first time is happy, beautiful and acknowledged as such. But there will be hell to pay for this success—not only her mother but two youngsters who douse her in buckets of fresh-killed pig blood so that Carrie once again uses her "wild talent," flexes her mind and a complete catastrophe (explosion and an uncontrolled fire) virtually destroys the town.
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these youngsters who once ate peanut butter now scrawl "Carrie White eats shit." But as they still say around here, "Sit a spell and collect yourself."Pub Date: April 8, 1974
ISBN: 0385086954
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1974
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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