Valente is a promising writer. She should write something else.
A high school shooter kills 36, including himself, and then a series of house fires annihilates the bereaved families.
“Three days after Caleb Raynor opened fire, the first house burned to the ground.” Valente’s debut tracks four survivors of a St. Louis–area high school massacre from their hiding places during the rampage through the grief-stricken weeks ahead, when, amid the funerals, the surviving families of the victims are incinerated in their sleep, so completely that no bodies are found. The chapters alternate between a collective first-person voice—“We stayed in. We did not move”—and close-up narration following Matt, Zola, Nick, and Christina as they attempt to process what they have been through and write profiles of their dead classmates for the yearbook. Additionally, there are chapters titled “A Brief History of Containment,” “A Brief History of Cremation (Or How The Body Burns),” and so on, which deliver big chunks of factual information, poetically phrased. Matt was in the restroom making out with his boyfriend and exited to find his friend Caroline Black dead on the floor in a pool of blood. Zola was in the library, where the most people were killed—her memories are beyond description. Christina's and Nick’s classes were spared a visit from the shooter, but Christina’s boyfriend was shot in the leg. A new set of devastating images haunts the four as the house fires begin, “the charring of so many homes that had held bodies that had held memories, a matryoshka of grief.” The novel itself is a matryoshka of grief, piling surreal tragedy on top of truth-inspired tragedy to poor effect. We never learn anything about the shooter or his motives, and the resolution of the mystery plot simply doesn’t fly.
Valente is a promising writer. She should write something else.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-242911-7
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 8, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2016
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
Falls short of Crichton’s many blockbusters, but fun reading nonetheless, especially for those interested in the early days...
In 1876, professor Edward Cope takes a group of students to the unforgiving American West to hunt for dinosaur fossils, and they make a tremendous discovery.
William Jason Tertullius Johnson, son of a shipbuilder and beneficiary of his father’s largess, isn’t doing very well at Yale when he makes a bet with his archrival (because every young man has one): accompany “the bone professor” Othniel Marsh to the West to dig for dinosaur fossils or pony up $1,000, but Marsh will only let Johnson join if he has a skill they can use. They need a photographer, so Johnson throws himself into the grueling task of learning photography, eventually becoming proficient. When Marsh and the team leave without him, he hitches a ride with another celebrated paleontologist, Marsh’s bitter rival, Edward Cope. Despite warnings about Indian activity, into the Judith badlands they go. It’s a harrowing trip: they weather everything from stampeding buffalo to back-breaking work, but it proves to be worth it after they discover the teeth of what looks to be a giant dinosaur, and it could be the discovery of the century if they can only get them back home safely. When the team gets separated while transporting the bones, Johnson finds himself in Deadwood and must find a way to get the bones home—and stay alive doing it. The manuscript for this novel was discovered in Crichton’s (Pirate Latitudes, 2009, etc.) archives by his wife, Sherri, and predates Jurassic Park (1990), but if readers are looking for the same experience, they may be disappointed: it’s strictly formulaic stuff. Famous folk like the Earp brothers make appearances, and Cope and Marsh, and the feud between them, were very real, although Johnson is the author’s own creation. Crichton takes a sympathetic view of American Indians and their plight, and his appreciation of the American West, and its harsh beauty, is obvious.
Falls short of Crichton’s many blockbusters, but fun reading nonetheless, especially for those interested in the early days of American paleontology.Pub Date: May 23, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-247335-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2017
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