An off-key Midwestern reminiscence with a self-pitying air of despondency.
A sensitive young college student is haunted by his hometown and the girl he never quite managed to leave behind.
The homecoming novel is such a tricky business—all that aching pining, the pregnant pauses, the glossy remembrances of truly ordinary moments. It’s all here in the deftly composed but emotionally sodden debut novel by essayist and literary critic Lytal. This go-round is sincere to the point of exasperation, while the whole story is trying so hard to be something weightier than its parts. Young Jim Praley has come home from the big city to visit his parents in Tulsa, a hometown that Praley delights in spinning into fables for his friends, his “Tulsa stories.” At a party, Jim meets Adrienne Booker, the bright beating heart of the Tulsa art and music scene, who ruthlessly and casually sleeps with him. They spend a summer kind-of together, barring the bisexual advances of Adrienne’s BFF Chase Fitzpatrick. Eventually, the romance simply fizzles out, and Jim returns to the East Coast to finish college and work at a small literary press. Drowning himself in parties and work years later, Jim is startled when he gets word from Chase that Adrienne has been seriously injured in a drunken motorcycle accident. Unfortunately, the narrative falls off a cliff in this second half as Jim reconnects with friends, fences with Adrienne’s family and contemplates staying in Tulsa with his broken ex-girlfriend. Lytal writes with compassion, but the long poetic sequences about walking around a city get a bit melodramatic over time. “I had used downtown as the backdrop to a love story—but most people aren’t so willful. At their roots, the skyscrapers are dumb,” he writes. Neither offbeat enough to keep readers’ attentions nor poignant enough to justify its lingering melancholia, the whole sad affair winds up feeling like a half-finished love letter at the bottom of a drawer.
An off-key Midwestern reminiscence with a self-pitying air of despondency.Pub Date: March 26, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-14-242259-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2013
Shalvis’ latest retains her spark and sizzle.
Piper Manning is determined to sell her family’s property so she can leave her hometown behind, but when her siblings come back with life-changing secrets and her sexy neighbor begins to feel like “The One,” she might have to redo her to-do list.
As children, Piper and her younger siblings, Gavin and Winnie, were sent to live with their grandparents in Wildstone, California, from the Congo after one of Gavin’s friends was killed. Their parents were supposed to meet them later but never made it. Piper wound up being more of a parent than her grandparents, though: “In the end, Piper had done all the raising. It’d taken forever, but now, finally, her brother and sister were off living their own lives.” Piper, the queen of the bullet journal, plans to fix up the family’s lakeside property her grandparents left the three siblings when they died. Selling it will enable her to study to be a physician’s assistant as she’s always wanted. However, just as the goal seems in sight, Gavin and Winnie come home, ostensibly for Piper’s 30th birthday, and then never leave. Turns out, Piper’s brother and sister have recently managed to get into a couple buckets of trouble, and they need some time to reevaluate their options. They aren’t willing to share their problems with Piper, though they’ve been completely open with each other. And Winnie, who’s pregnant, has been very open with Piper’s neighbor Emmitt Reid and his visiting son, Camden, since the baby’s father is Cam’s younger brother, Rowan, who died a few months earlier in a car accident. Everyone has issues to navigate, made more complicated by Gavin and Winnie’s swearing Cam to secrecy just as he and Piper try—and fail—to ignore their attraction to each other. Shalvis keeps the physical and emotional tension high, though the siblings’ refusal to share with Piper becomes tedious and starts to feel childish.
Shalvis’ latest retains her spark and sizzle.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-296139-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
New York is colonized by giant talking canines in newcomer Bakis's wry variation on the traditional shaggy dog story. Imagination is the key here. We need to understand that at the end of the 19th century a crazed German biologist named Augustus Rank performed a succession of medical experiments that resulted in a weird genetic mutation of his subjects and created a race of ``monster dogs''—giant rottweilers and Dobermans who can speak and walk on their hind legs. After living for more than a hundred years in the seclusion of a remote Canadian settlement called Rankstadt, they are forced to move in the year 2008 to New York (where 150 of them take up residence at the Plaza Hotel) when Rankstadt is destroyed. In their 19th-century garb—Prussian military uniforms for the ``men,'' bustles for the ``women''—they cut impressive figures on the streets of Manhattan, where they quickly become celebrities and philanthropists. At Christmas they parade down Fifth Avenue in sleighs, and shortly after their arrival they construct an enormous Bavarian castle on the Lower East Side. When an NYU coed named Cleo Pira writes about them for a local newspaper, the dogs adopt her as their spokesperson and bring her into the inner life of their society. From Cleo's perspective the dogs are benign, quaint, and deeply tragic, and the more fascinated she becomes by their history—both as they relate it to her and as she discovers it for herself through Rank's own archives—the darker and more doomed their society appears. By the time Cleo has learned the secrets contained in Rank's past, it's too late to save his descendants, who have unknowingly brought about their own destruction. Serious enough, but also funny and imaginative: a vivid parable that manages to amuse even as it perplexes and intrigues.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-374-18987-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1996
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