With a satirist’s eye and fleet, insightful prose, LaPlante delivers gratifying if somewhat foreseeable twists in one girl’s...
Quirky mystery writer LaPlante (Circle of Wives, 2014, etc.) switches things up in her latest tale, a spin on teen dystopian fiction with a decidedly grown-up kick.
Teenage Anna, the only child of cheerful iconoclasts (mom tunes grand pianos for a living, while dad maps earthquakes), is spiraling into a deep funk, unable to blend in with her Silicon Valley peers or, lately, lift limbs out of bed. Except at rare moments—with her worried parents; her mean but interesting chemistry teacher, Ms. Thadeous; and her former protector from childhood, Jim (college football star, now living in exile in his parents’ rec room)—she feels “as receptive to human interaction as a slab of meat." The therapist she’s dragged to prescribes meds but frames Anna’s outsider mentality as “a simple misalignment with her herd” and urges her to “Hunt with the pack….Even if it’s just an act at first.” Anna’s mood grows still bleaker, until she meets Lars, the geeky but oddly cocky son of the new family next door. An instant outcast at school, Lars is unfazed by taunts and furtive pummeling. When he spills his secret to Anna—that he and his family are working to expedite certain Biblical prophecies—he really gets her attention. “We could use you,” he tells her. That she doesn’t scoff at this invitation is a given—and it’s not all new-moon madness. As she tells her USGS–tracking dad, “You yourself say we don’t have much longer on this planet….Might we not be talking about the same things in different ways?” She doesn’t share that she’s signed up to join other true believers at a remote ranch. Her journey there will settle the question once and for all but not before she endures a seismic event close to home.
With a satirist’s eye and fleet, insightful prose, LaPlante delivers gratifying if somewhat foreseeable twists in one girl’s search for salvation.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2165-3
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...
An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.
Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.Pub Date: March 6, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-70376-4
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000
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
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