A diverting comedy familiar in style though unusual in content.
Five Weekquaesgeek who leased Manhattan to the Dutch 400 years ago return to reclaim their land in this caper.
In 1626, Gov. Gen. Peter Minuit tricked Chief Flying Cloud into signing over a 400- (not 40-) year lease on Manhattan Island. Since then, Minuit, a powerful wizard, has exerted a controlling influence on the borough, buying real estate and demanding obeisance from politicians and criminals alike. For their part, Chief Flying Cloud and the remnants of his tribe have been in a mystical sleep, waiting for the 400 years to pass. They awake in Central Park and meet Tom Linden, a tour guide with a master’s in American history. Tom is moved to help the Weekquaesgeek pursue their claim, but first he must acclimatize them to New York City in all its unfathomable modernity. Minuit, meanwhile, creates a golem to set upon Chief Flying Cloud. Will Tom and the Weekquaesgeek survive this and other attacks? Can the Native Americans reassemble the Spear of Lightning and Thunder and take back what is theirs? Can the wizard be defeated? And does Tom have a chance with the chief’s fearsome daughter, Fights Like a Man? De Castro (Chasing Your Tail, 2017) has crafted a film comedy in prose form and makes suitably merry with the culture clash between displaced Native Americans and modern New Yorkers (the former often showing up the absurdities of the latter). The authenticity of the Weekquaesgeek characterization is hard to judge except to say that they come across as honorable, intelligent, and far more capable than the Americans who supplanted them. The present-day players are over-the-top, but in the deliberately heightened, snappy-dialogue way of rom-coms. The supernatural creatures are played for laughs, the drollest of which come from the pacifist golem as it seeks out its own destruction at the inept hands of the NYPD. Tom in many ways is the least developed of the protagonists, but such, perhaps, is the way of the stock Everyman character. The lighthearted adventure froths along regardless and carries him with it—well-scripted, if inconsequential.
A diverting comedy familiar in style though unusual in content.Pub Date: April 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-64133-403-7
Page Count: 242
Publisher: AuthorCentrix, Inc.
Review Posted Online: Sept. 7, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
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BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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