A very relevant love story with strong crossover possibilities for teen readers.
In Boston, an idealistic schoolteacher gets her artist boyfriend a job with her father’s video game company even as she's losing a promising student to the addiction of gaming.
Goodman’s (The Cookbook Collector, 2010, etc.) eighth novel takes place in two skillfully evoked worlds that are at war for the hearts and minds of young people: video games versus education, specifically high school English classes. Nina is the only child of the rich and powerful man behind Arkadia, a virtual-reality game company. Just out of college, she has taken a position with TeacherCorps and is now somewhat desperately attempting to communicate the joys of Emerson and Shakespeare to the ethnically diverse but universally bored students of Emerson High. Collin, the “chalk artist” of the title, is a 23-year-old dropout who works in a bar and can draw like an angel. Soon after the two fall in love, he finds himself designing horses on a high-tech tablet at the Arkadia image factory. Twins Aidan and Diana are Nina’s students, but Aidan is not doing his homework. He is deeply lost in the world of “EverWhen,” where his avatar meets and falls in love with a sexy Tree Elf named Riyah who says she can get him a pre-release of “Underworld,” Arkadia’s hotly awaited next game, if he will perform a real-world promotional task that crosses the line into criminality. The language and details of the games—sparkling aeroflakes, epic qwests, diamond flasks “filled with a hatchling dragon’s blood”—are the strongest and most original elements of the book: in fact, nongaming readers may be surprised to find themselves wondering if they are missing out on something. On the other hand, some of the plot developments relating to Aidan feel forced, and his twin almost seems to be living in a different novel with her weight problems and sexuality issues.
A very relevant love story with strong crossover possibilities for teen readers.Pub Date: June 13, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6987-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Dial Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2017
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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