A cozy nonmystery that will be welcomed by Woodman’s loyal following.
The third in Woodman’s series about a Scottish expatriate living among other lovable eccentrics in a northern Indian village.
It’s the early 1960s, and Jana Bibi (born Janet Laird), 60 herself, and her garrulous parrot, Mr. Ganguly, continue their harmonious existence in the bustling fictional hamlet of Hamara Nagar. India’s social ills are far from the foreground but surface in the back stories of two characters: Mary, Jana’s longtime housekeeper and cook, who ran away from an abusive arranged marriage in South India, and Tilku, an orphan boy, who was rescued by Jana. (Long widowed, she was married to a missionary and lost both her husband and two daughters to smallpox.) News from her son, Jack, now a successful Glasgow engineer, unsettles Jana’s routine of regular lunches with the town’s two movers and shakers, newspaper editor Rambir and resale merchant Ramachandran. Jack’s letter announces his engagement to Katarina, a Hungarian refugee, and the couple plans a spring visit. However, Jolly Grant House, the genteelly crumbling compound Jana inherited from her grandfather, is in no shape for visitors, nor, dare Jana hope, a wedding! The house needs a total overhaul, everything from such basics as a hot-water heater to new curtains and carpets. But Jana’s finances are strained not only by Tilku’s boarding school tuition, but by a local policeman’s frequent visits to extract ever more fanciful fines. Reluctantly, she pawns her prized emerald necklace and earrings to a local jeweler. Romance begins to burgeon elsewhere in Jana’s entourage: Mary and Jacob John, caretakers to Jana’s elderly friend Sylvia, have Catholicism and enthusiasm for Bollywood movies in common, and Jana herself wonders if anything could bloom between her and her travel writer friend, Kenneth. Further complications arise—Tilku is having trouble at school, and Katarina is, to Mary’s horror, a picky eater. But such crises are quickly resolved, as if Woodman were hesitant to let real life intrude on such pleasant fiction.
A cozy nonmystery that will be welcomed by Woodman’s loyal following.Pub Date: July 8, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9358-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: June 14, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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