Pithy, entertaining, inconsequential.
Fictional author Walker is back for more privileged and outlandish adventures in this follow-up to White Girl Problems (2012), the faux memoir based on her Twitter feed.
25-year-old Babe is fresh out of rehab. Having theoretically recovered from a shopping addiction (her flippant tone suggests otherwise), she returns to LA to take up residence in the luxe guesthouse on her father’s property. But Babe’s plans of being Zen, wearing only vintage and drinking only juice are interrupted immediately. Her closest friends throw her a raucous, unwanted welcome party (and have the audacity to have gotten on with their lives in her absence), a creepy, violent message shows up in black lipstick on her bathroom mirror (so not chic), and she reconnects with the recent love-of-her-life, Robert, who previously took out a restraining order on her. That’s because Babe’s love for Robert brings out her alter ego, Babette, a tacky, needy, marriage-obsessed binge eater, who promptly makes herself known again. Babe runs away to Paris to reclaim her true self, the unrestrained consumer of designer clothes and rosé wine. When the lipstick stalker strikes rather obviously again, Babe keeps running across Europe, having outsized, near-slapstick episodes along the way, all of which involve some combination of booze, drugs, shopping and graphic sex. The clueless rich girl is always a tricky heroine to root for, and Babe is no exception. She's both refreshingly egotistical and childishly shallow. She sometimes seems genuinely psychologically delicate, but Babette is grotesque and hard to credit. Considering Babe’s start as a Twitter feed, it's unsurprising that the book amplifies humorous antics and intense snobbery, but it comes at the expense of the sympathetic or the real. Without much resembling a conscience, Babe is a long way from her predecessors: Austen’s Emma or her more modern equivalent, Cher Horowitz.
Pithy, entertaining, inconsequential.Pub Date: April 29, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-3415-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these...
Figuratively and literally shattering moments of hoRRRRRipilication in Chamberlain, Maine where stones fly from the sky rather than from the hands of the villagers (as they did in "The Lottery," although the latter are equal to other forms of persecution).
All beginning when Carrie White discovers a gift with telekinetic powers (later established as a genetic fact), after she menstruates in full ignorance of the process and thinks she is bleeding to death while the other monsters in the high school locker room bait and bully her mercilessly. Carrie is the only child of a fundamentalist freak mother who has brought her up with a concept of sin which no blood of the Lamb can wash clean. In addition to a sympathetic principal and gym teacher, there's one girl who wishes to atone and turns her date for the spring ball over to Carrie who for the first time is happy, beautiful and acknowledged as such. But there will be hell to pay for this success—not only her mother but two youngsters who douse her in buckets of fresh-killed pig blood so that Carrie once again uses her "wild talent," flexes her mind and a complete catastrophe (explosion and an uncontrolled fire) virtually destroys the town.
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these youngsters who once ate peanut butter now scrawl "Carrie White eats shit." But as they still say around here, "Sit a spell and collect yourself."Pub Date: April 8, 1974
ISBN: 0385086954
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1974
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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