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
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.
Doerr presents us with two intricate stories, both of which take place during World War II; late in the novel, inevitably, they intersect.
In August 1944, Marie-Laure LeBlanc is a blind 16-year-old living in the walled port city of Saint-Malo in Brittany and hoping to escape the effects of Allied bombing. D-Day took place two months earlier, and Cherbourg, Caen and Rennes have already been liberated. She’s taken refuge in this city with her great-uncle Etienne, at first a fairly frightening figure to her. Marie-Laure’s father was a locksmith and craftsman who made scale models of cities that Marie-Laure studied so she could travel around on her own. He also crafted clever and intricate boxes, within which treasures could be hidden. Parallel to the story of Marie-Laure we meet Werner and Jutta Pfennig, a brother and sister, both orphans who have been raised in the Children’s House outside Essen, in Germany. Through flashbacks we learn that Werner had been a curious and bright child who developed an obsession with radio transmitters and receivers, both in their infancies during this period. Eventually, Werner goes to a select technical school and then, at 18, into the Wehrmacht, where his technical aptitudes are recognized and he’s put on a team trying to track down illegal radio transmissions. Etienne and Marie-Laure are responsible for some of these transmissions, but Werner is intrigued since what she’s broadcasting is innocent—she shares her passion for Jules Verne by reading aloud 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. A further subplot involves Marie-Laure’s father’s having hidden a valuable diamond, one being tracked down by Reinhold von Rumpel, a relentless German sergeant-major.
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.Pub Date: May 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-4658-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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