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
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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