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TIME'S A THIEF

Name: TIME'S A THIEF
Author: B.G. Firmani
ISBN: 978-0-385-54186-2

by B.G. Firmani ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 2, 2017

When all is said and done, one’s love/hate relationship with this book leans to the side of love.

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In 1980s New York, a naïve young intellectual is entranced, employed, exasperated, and expelled by members of a wealthy family.

Firmani’s debut tells the story of Francesca “Chess” Varani from her first year at Barnard until “the day when youth finally died” two decades later, when she learns what became of a wealthy college friend named Kendra Marr-Löwenstein, whose writer mother she worked for as a personal assistant, whose musician brother she fell in love with, whose whole exotic, damaged family bewitched her then betrayed her utterly. Like last year’s Sweetbitter by Stephanie Danler, it is the coming-of-age of a young woman under the influence of unwholesome Manhattan sophisticates; like the previous year’s City on Fire by Garth Risk Hallberg, it is a nostalgic paean to the city’s recent past, studded with continual highbrow references. One character’s personality is summed up by the fact that she reads Jürgen Habermas in the original German, another leaves a conversation about Ivan Chtcheglov’s Formulary for a New Urbanism to puke in an umbrella stand, and everything Chess sets eyes on recalls one artist or another. Despite her generous hand with her encyclopedic knowledge of everything, Chess is an engaging character, often very funny and cool. From working-class Italian origins in a burg she calls Barfonia, she details her enchantment by the Marr-Löwensteins from the night she meets Kendra standing in the street at 4 a.m. with blue hair, a clutch purse sagging with dexies, and the air of “deposed royalty.” She asks Chess for a light. “Of course I had a light. I was born with a Zippo in my hand,” Chess tells the reader. The Marr-Löwensteins, Salinger-esque in some ways (the one Chess falls for is named Jerry), are the novel’s biggest problem. Unremittingly described in the most extreme, overheated terms, not one of them ever seems like a real person, and they don’t act like real people either, disappearing without a trace for years at a time, reappearing in places they can’t possibly know Chess will be, both more awful and more magical than they need to be to engage our emotions.

When all is said and done, one’s love/hate relationship with this book leans to the side of love.

Pub Date: May 2, 2017

ISBN: 978-0-385-54186-2

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2017

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

by Harper Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 1960

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A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.

Pub Date: July 11, 1960

ISBN: 0060935464

Page Count: 323

Publisher: Lippincott

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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DISTANT SHORES

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 2002

Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...

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Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.

After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?

Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).