A slight first novel with a sluggish plot whose elliptical segments explore unsatisfactory family relationships and a teenage pregnancy, though in a nicely detailed 1960s suburban Californian setting. Three women narrate: Maggie Harris, the teenager who became pregnant; her mother, Marian Harris; and Marian’s aunt, the raffish Mrs. Rumsen. There are also brief, mawkish contributions from siblings Jamie and Alison, while Maggie’s portions of the tale often move into the future as she gives sketchy intimations of her life once she’s left California. The Harris family doesn’t have much cash. Father Jim, a developer, keeps investing in properties that are supposed to make him rich but never do. Marian, a skilled seamstress, sews for extra income, but financial disaster always seems imminent. As she sews, Marian recalls her alcoholic mother and lonely childhood. Maggie’s narration, meanwhile, records how at 16 she fell in love with Bruce, a recent high-school graduate preparing to enlist. Unfortunately, though, neither Maggie nor Bruce is developed enough to carry a story effectively detailing the ways families hurt and help each other. When Maggie learns she’s pregnant (after Bruce’s Christmas leave) and tries to tell her parents, they fight, so she runs away. Finally, a family truce ends in tragedy, and Maggie moves in with Mrs. Rumsen, who once lost everything she treasured in a fire and has her own memories of being rejected by her family. Maggie has the baby and decides, looking at the way Mrs. Rumsen has made a life for herself, that it’s possible “to gather up bits and pieces of the wrecked past and make something fine of them.” Newcomer Darby tries hard to map the hostile and difficult terrain of family life, but her characters are too weak to give her much help.
Pub Date: May 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-688-16778-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1999
A fable about the consolatory and strengthening powers of religion flounders about somewhere inside this unconventional coming-of-age tale, which was shortlisted for Canada’s Governor General’s Award. The story is told in retrospect by Piscine Molitor Patel (named for a swimming pool, thereafter fortuitously nicknamed “Pi”), years after he was shipwrecked when his parents, who owned a zoo in India, were attempting to emigrate, with their menagerie, to Canada. During 227 days at sea spent in a lifeboat with a hyena, an orangutan, a zebra, and a 450-pound Bengal tiger (mostly with the latter, which had efficiently slaughtered its fellow beasts), Pi found serenity and courage in his faith: a frequently reiterated amalgam of Muslim, Hindu, and Christian beliefs. The story of his later life, education, and mission rounds out, but does not improve upon, the alternately suspenseful and whimsical account of Pi’s ordeal at sea—which offers the best reason for reading this otherwise preachy and somewhat redundant story of his Life.
Pub Date: June 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-15-100811-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An improvement over The Dead Zone, with King returning to his most tried-and-true blueprint. As in The Shining, the psi-carrier is a child, an eight-year-old girl named Charlie; but instead of foresight or hindsight, Charlie has firestarting powers. She looks and a thing pops into flame—a teddy bear, a nasty man's shoes, or (by novel's end) steel walls, whole houses, and stables and crowds of government villains. Charlie's parents Vicky and Andy were once college guinea pigs for drug experiments by The Shop, a part of the supersecret Department of Scientific Intelligence, and were given a hyperpowerful hallucinogen which affected their chromosomes and left each with strange powers of mental transference and telekinesis. When Vicky and Andy married, their genes produced Charlie and her wild talent for pyrokinesis: even as a baby in her crib, Charlie would start fires when upset and, later on, once set her mother's hands on fire. So Andy is trying to teach Charlie how to keep her volatile emotions in check. But when one day he comes home to find Vicky gruesomely dead in the ironing-board-closet, murdered by The Shop (all the experimental guinea pigs are being eliminated), Andy goes into hiding with Charlie in Manhattan and the Vermont backwoods—and Charlie uses her powers to set the bad men on fire and blow up their cars. They're soon captured, however, by Rainbird, a one-eyed giant Indian with a melted face—and father and daughter, separated, spend months being tested in The Shop. Then Andy engineers their escape, but when Andy is shot by Rainbird, Charlie turns loose her atomic eyes on the big compound. . . . Dumb, very, and still a far cry from the excitement of The Shining or Salem's Lot—but King keeps the story moving with his lively fire-gimmick and fewer pages of cotton padding than in his recent, sluggish efforts. The built-in readership will not be disappointed.
Pub Date: Sept. 29, 1980
ISBN: 0451167805
Page Count: 398
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1980
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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