You know you're in trouble when a novel leads off with a tendentious authorial forward that tells you how to read the book you've just opened. ``Rat is not exclusively a book about animals, even though such an interpretation may also be acceptable. On the contrary, it is a novel about the laws that govern society, about our mythologies, our truths and lies, about love and hope, loneliness and nostalgia.'' Zaniewski, a Polish poet and academician, clues us in thusly—but the book he delivers is in fact none of this at all. It's the endlessly belabored story of a rat: a running, copulating, baby-eating rat; a pig-stealing, chicken-snatching, and—on occasion—people-plaguing rodent that is forever chased, reviled, and seeking safety. The rat, as rats go, is believable enough- -horrifying, in other words—but there's not much that can be done with him other than to get him (rather incredibly) onto various trains and boats or into secret passageways that provide a change of scene for the most brutishly circumscribed of existences. A war is also going on among the humans—occasioning lots of blood drinking (a point about as subtle as a cleaver). And when the rat actually encounters a piper (``From the level of a bookshelf, you watch the man holding to his lips a long black pipe, from which issue the tones that transform you, alter you, vanquish you. Petrified, motionless, stunned, I listen to the music as if it were a dream, although it isn't a dream''), you want to squeak and moan yourself at the desperate artifice. It isn't often that you actually wish there were a greater measure of anthropomorphism in an animal allegory, but you do here. Blunt and boring.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1994
ISBN: 1-55970-262-1
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1994
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
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