Sluggish pace and colorless prose don’t add up to much of a mystery, in this seventh novel from the author of Suspicion...
What if a happy gang of teenagers take a vow in 1972 to reunite twenty years later, and one of them seems to have vanished?
Whatever happened to Angel Busky? Beautiful Angel was sexually adventurous, collecting high-school virgins just for the fun of it, planning to have six children by six different men, and the like. Two decades later, Willa, the smart girl of the ragtag group, wonders about her erstwhile bosom buddy. Willa’s become the writer of a tell-all biography of Ivy Compton-Burnett, which has inexplicably found avid readers. At a book signing, she runs into still-handsome Patrick, another member of the gang, now an NYU professor. He doesn’t know what became of Angel, either, but they catch up on bad boy Caleb; Jeremiah, the virgin geek; Shake, the harmonica player; Vinny, the tough-talking guinea; and Travis, the stoner. Willa wants to dig deeper, being no stranger to the dark side of human nature: Her husband Simon, a criminal lawyer, died when a tenement, the site of his love nest with a lady judge, collapsed. Willa was shattered but she keeps busy raising her 14-year-old daughter Chloe—and fretting lately about the pretty teenager’s sudden interest in a delivery boy. She hires p.i. Jovan Luisi to find Angel or figure out what happened to her, not knowing that the taciturn investigator is instantly smitten with her. There’s a long road ahead, covering everyone’s post–high-school history: Travis builds abode houses in the Southwest; Caleb married a rich widow and got into unsavory schemes; Vinny has a gas station and auto-repair shop; Shake still makes that old harmonica moan and wail. But what about Jeremiah? He was always a little strange, but now . . . . Some screaming, some skulking around in the woods, until the not-surprising truth is revealed in a lackluster denouement.
Sluggish pace and colorless prose don’t add up to much of a mystery, in this seventh novel from the author of Suspicion (1999), etc.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-7432-0599-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2002
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
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