Kinky Friedman meets Carl Hiaasen for harmless but slightly forced fun and games.
A good-lookin’ gal gone wrong goes right but it takes a couple of lonesome cowboys to pull it off.
NPR commentator and erstwhile veterinarian Black picks up the story of champion rodeo rider Lincoln Delgado Davis, known to one and all as Lick and last seen in 1994’s Hey, Cowboy, Wanna Get Lucky?, where he rode a wild bull and appeared nude on a camel. Black sets his hero down two years later in the sparsely settled Idaho/Nevada border country where unlucky Lick is paired up with gabby WWII vet and retired rodeo rider Al Bean, looking after a small herd under a big empty sky. From which falls Ms. Teddie Arizona, a hard-partying cocktail waitress whose deal with the devil has gone way wrong. Seems Teddie (known to most as T.A.) signed on for a two-year hitch posing as the wife of a big jerk from Las Vegas, Mr. F.Rank Pantaker. It seemed like a good idea at the time. F.Rank needed to convince his family he was a sober citizen, and T.A. needed to get the hell out of Vail, where the law was about to sweep her up with her drug-dealing roommates. But when T.A. learned that F.Rank had joined with Vegas animal trainer Ponce de Crayon in a scheme to bring big spenders to Ponce’s ranch for a chance to slaughter endangered species, well, that was just too damned much. Pausing only to clear five million dollars in hunting deposits out F.Rank’s wall safe, T.A. flew out of Vegas in the company plane only to hit a storm somewhere past Elko, where she crashed into the path of Al and Lick, who were out checking up on some missing cows. Lick and T.A. have to put off consummation of a pretty mutual attraction to stop that hunt, an effort that will involve a huge, half-loco cast of characters.
Kinky Friedman meets Carl Hiaasen for harmless but slightly forced fun and games.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2005
ISBN: 0-609-61091-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
A newcomer to watch: fresh, funny, and tough.
Seven stories, including a couple of prizewinners, from an exuberantly talented young Thai-American writer.
In the poignant title story, a young man accompanies his mother to Kok Lukmak, the last in the chain of Andaman Islands—where the two can behave like “farangs,” or foreigners, for once. It’s his last summer before college, her last before losing her eyesight. As he adjusts to his unsentimental mother’s acceptance of her fate, they make tentative steps toward the future. “Farangs,” included in Best New American Voices 2005 (p. 711), is about a flirtation between a Thai teenager who keeps a pet pig named Clint Eastwood and an American girl who wanders around in a bikini. His mother, who runs a motel after having been deserted by the boy’s American father, warns him about “bonking” one of the guests. “Draft Day” concerns a relieved but guilty young man whose father has bribed him out of the draft, and in “Don’t Let Me Die in This Place,” a bitter grandfather has moved from the States to Bangkok to live with his son, his Thai daughter-in-law, and two grandchildren. The grandfather’s grudging adjustment to the move and to his loss of autonomy (from a stroke) is accelerated by a visit to a carnival, where he urges the whole family into a game of bumper cars. The longest story, “Cockfighter,” is an astonishing coming-of-ager about feisty Ladda, 15, who watches as her father, once the best cockfighter in town, loses his status, money, and dignity to Little Jui, 16, a meth addict whose father is the local crime boss. Even Ladda is in danger, as Little Jui’s bodyguards try to abduct her. Her mother tells Ladda a family secret about her father’s failure of courage in fighting Big Jui to save his own sister’s honor. By the time Little Jui has had her father beaten and his ear cut off, Ladda has begun to realize how she must fend for herself.
A newcomer to watch: fresh, funny, and tough.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-8021-1788-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2004
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