Readable and clever, this novel might make an easy transition to the movie screen, where stock characters, oblivious parents...
The sadism and smaller cruelties of high school get a workout in this patchy novel, which features violence and bloodshed without a single vampire, werewolf or zombie.
Pittsburgh-area St. Michael’s needs major repairs to its building, staff and traditions as the school year starts in 1991. In the cinematic opening flashback, a tormented boy on the school’s roof topples statues of saints toward kids below. Freshmen confront not just the usual first-year anxieties, but yearlong hazing by seniors. A budding friendship between newbies Peter Davidek and Noah Stein becomes an enduring alliance, despite their shared desire for classmate Lorelei Pascal. She wants to be popular, Peter hopes to survive, but in the smart, fearless Noah, Breznican creates a likable rebel. Born of Jewish and Lutheran parents, his troubled back story includes his mother’s death in a fire that scarred his face and constant fights that lead to being expelled from public school, leaving St. Mike’s his only option. The ineffectual staff includes many St. Mike’s alumni, who tend to abet the hazing they too once suffered or to inflict their own punishments. The exception is the well-intentioned principal, Sister Maria, who battles the insidious pastor, Father Mercedes, a caricature of nastiness (he smokes in church!). The school’s most-powerful person is senior Hannah Kraut, feared by students and staff alike because she has been collecting everyone’s secrets in a notebook that will be aired before graduation. That's an obvious echo of the movie Mean Girls and its “Burn Book,” yet Breznican weaves a much darker tale than Tina Fey’s, one in which there seems to be no limit to the kinds and amount of pain young people will inflict on one another.
Readable and clever, this novel might make an easy transition to the movie screen, where stock characters, oblivious parents and needless repetition are familiar, but today's audiences probably won't go for a look at an era that lacks the viral abuses of cyberbullying.Pub Date: June 10, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-250-01935-6
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
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
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
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