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
Honeyman’s endearing debut is part comic novel, part emotional thriller, and part love story.
A very funny novel about the survivor of a childhood trauma.
At 29, Eleanor Oliphant has built an utterly solitary life that almost works. During the week, she toils in an office—don’t inquire further; in almost eight years no one has—and from Friday to Monday she makes the time go by with pizza and booze. Enlivening this spare existence is a constant inner monologue that is cranky, hilarious, deadpan, and irresistible. Eleanor Oliphant has something to say about everything. Riding the train, she comments on the automated announcements: “I wondered at whom these pearls of wisdom were aimed; some passing extraterrestrial, perhaps, or a yak herder from Ulan Bator who had trekked across the steppes, sailed the North Sea, and found himself on the Glasgow-Edinburgh service with literally no prior experience of mechanized transport to call upon.” Eleanor herself might as well be from Ulan Bator—she’s never had a manicure or a haircut, worn high heels, had anyone visit her apartment, or even had a friend. After a mysterious event in her childhood that left half her face badly scarred, she was raised in foster care, spent her college years in an abusive relationship, and is now, as the title states, perfectly fine. Her extreme social awkwardness has made her the butt of nasty jokes among her colleagues, which don’t seem to bother her much, though one notices she is stockpiling painkillers and becoming increasingly obsessed with an unrealistic crush on a local musician. Eleanor’s life begins to change when Raymond, a goofy guy from the IT department, takes her for a potential friend, not a freak of nature. As if he were luring a feral animal from its hiding place with a bit of cheese, he gradually brings Eleanor out of her shell. Then it turns out that shell was serving a purpose.
Honeyman’s endearing debut is part comic novel, part emotional thriller, and part love story.Pub Date: May 9, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-7352-2068-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Pamela Dorman/Viking
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
More faithful to the original but less astonishing than Christopher Logue’s work and lacking some of the music of Fagles’...
Fresh version of one of the world’s oldest epic poems, a foundational text of Western literature.
Sing to me, O muse, of the—well, in the very opening line, the phrase Wilson (Classical Studies, Univ. of Pennsylvania) chooses is the rather bland “complicated man,” the adjective missing out on the deviousness implied in the Greek polytropos, which Robert Fagles translated as “of twists and turns.” Wilson has a few favorite words that the Greek doesn’t strictly support, one of them being “monstrous,” meaning something particularly heinous, and to have Telemachus “showing initiative” seems a little report-card–ish and entirely modern. Still, rose-fingered Dawn is there in all her glory, casting her brilliant light over the wine-dark sea, and Wilson has a lively understanding of the essential violence that underlies the complicated Odysseus’ great ruse to slaughter the suitors who for 10 years have been eating him out of palace and home and pitching woo to the lovely, blameless Penelope; son Telemachus shows that initiative, indeed, by stringing up a bevy of servant girls, “their heads all in a row / …strung up with the noose around their necks / to make their death an agony.” In an interesting aside in her admirably comprehensive introduction, which extends nearly 80 pages, Wilson observes that the hanging “allows young Telemachus to avoid being too close to these girls’ abused, sexualized bodies,” and while her reading sometimes tends to be overly psychologized, she also notes that the violence of Odysseus, by which those suitors “fell like flies,” mirrors that of some of the other ungracious hosts he encountered along his long voyage home to Ithaca.
More faithful to the original but less astonishing than Christopher Logue’s work and lacking some of the music of Fagles’ recent translations of Homer; still, a readable and worthy effort.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-393-08905-9
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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