As fiction, utterly devastating; as psychology, grim and apocalyptic: a ripped-bare portrait of the evil that children can...
A band of young girls embarks on a Lord of the Flies–esque trip to the country.
With aplomb, Bathurst makes the leap from an unusually absorbing nonfiction debut—The Lighthouse Stevensons (1999), about the family that built most of the lighthouses on Scotland’s craggy shores—to this harrowing first novel about the hell of early teenage life. Several 14-year-old London schoolgirls are being sent via bus to an old manor in the countryside for a few weeks of mostly pointless exercises and activities under the watchful eye of two of the school’s more hated teachers. Not that the girls need anyone else to hate: there’s enough jealousy, competitiveness, and sheer evil encompassed in their daily interactions to fill the schedules of numerous full-time therapists. Hen, who seems the closest thing to a protagonist, hasn’t been her usual spunky self since she moved down from Scotland, and she’s on the verge of wasting away from anorexia. Her “friend” Jules is roiling with bitterness toward Hen (and toward just about everyone else) and loses no opportunity to show her up in front of the others. Ruling the roost is Caz, the preternaturally tanned, toned, well-developed and well-poised one who is roundly hated by every other girl on the trip, though you wouldn’t know it by the way the girls flop over themselves in a desperate, clawing battle to be her favored sycophant. When the girls aren’t busy tearing each other apart with biting comments and never-ending one-upmanship, they sneak into the small nearby town to wander around unsupervised and carouse with a group of loser guys who see easy prey. Nothing good comes out of any of it, of course, and there’s little hope, generally, to be found in these bleak and fiercely detailed pages.
As fiction, utterly devastating; as psychology, grim and apocalyptic: a ripped-bare portrait of the evil that children can do.Pub Date: May 9, 2003
ISBN: 0-618-26327-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Steinbeck is a genius and an original.
Steinbeck refuses to allow himself to be pigeonholed.
This is as completely different from Tortilla Flat and In Dubious Battle as they are from each other. Only in his complete understanding of the proletarian mentality does he sustain a connecting link though this is assuredly not a "proletarian novel." It is oddly absorbing this picture of the strange friendship between the strong man and the giant with the mind of a not-quite-bright child. Driven from job to job by the failure of the giant child to fit into the social pattern, they finally find in a ranch what they feel their chance to achieve a homely dream they have built. But once again, society defeats them. There's a simplicity, a directness, a poignancy in the story that gives it a singular power, difficult to define. Steinbeck is a genius and an original.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 1936
ISBN: 0140177396
Page Count: 83
Publisher: Covici, Friede
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1936
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it...
Harris, creator of grand, symphonic thrillers from Fatherland(1992) to An Officer and a Spy(2014), scores with a chamber piece of a novel set in the Vatican in the days after a fictional pope dies.
Fictional, yes, but the nameless pontiff has a lot in common with our own Francis: He’s famously humble, shunning the lavish Apostolic Palace for a small apartment, and he is committed to leading a church that engages with the world and its problems. In the aftermath of his sudden death, rumors circulate about the pope’s intention to fire certain cardinals. At the center of the action is Cardinal Lomeli, Dean of the College of Cardinals, whose job it is to manage the conclave that will elect a new pope. He believes it is also his duty to uncover what the pope knew before he died because some of the cardinals in question are in the running to succeed him. “In the running” is an apt phrase because, as described by Harris, the papal conclave is the ultimate political backroom—albeit a room, the Sistine Chapel, covered with Michelangelo frescoes. Vying for the papal crown are an African cardinal whom many want to see as the first black pope, a press-savvy Canadian, an Italian arch-conservative (think Cardinal Scalia), and an Italian liberal who wants to continue the late pope’s campaign to modernize the church. The novel glories in the ancient rituals that constitute the election process while still grounding that process in the real world: the Sistine Chapel is fitted with jamming devices to thwart electronic eavesdropping, and the pressure to act quickly is increased because “rumours that the pope is dead are already trending on social media.”
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it is pure temptation.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-451-49344-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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