A thrown-together mishmash of fragmentary plot ideas, arbitrary events and discordant themes.
The discovery of a sunken World War II submarine plunges a rootless Labrador teen into a whirl of weird revelations and deadly danger.
Writing as if he were paid by the plotline, Bunn takes an actual news item about a similar find and spins around it a mare’s nest of premises and genre tropes. Having been shuttled for years among successive sets of exploitative foster parents and a group home, Wednesday skeptically fetches up in a run-down trailer with an out-of-work handyman and an airheaded beautician. Then, rambles in the nearby woods bring him encounters with Stump (aka Emily), a rough-hewn hermit’s home-schooled (but strangely well-socialized) daughter, and also the hidden hatch of a U-boat. Intercut flashbacks reveal that the German sub sank in the local river during a secret mission 70-plus years ago. The skeleton-filled sub contains both leads to a murderous spy ring still operating nearby and (shades of Dan Brown) an ancient weapon slated to join a cache of like mystical artifacts stolen by the Nazis. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the author leaves much unexplained (how did that sub come to be buried in dry ground?), is unable to maintain either logical or tonal consistency, and brings the tale to a confused climax that combines kidnappings, gunfire and laxatives.
A thrown-together mishmash of fragmentary plot ideas, arbitrary events and discordant themes. (Thriller. 11-13)Pub Date: April 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-938463-53-2
Page Count: 378
Publisher: Bitingduck Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
If it were a Golden Age comic, this tale of ridiculous science, space dogs and humanoid aliens with flashlights in their hands might not be bad. Alas... Number Four is a fugitive from the planet Lorien, which is sloppily described as both "hundreds of lightyears away" and "billions of miles away." Along with eight other children and their caretakers, Number Four escaped from the Mogadorian invasion of Lorien ten years ago. Now the nine children are scattered on Earth, hiding. Luckily and fairly nonsensically, the planet's Elders cast a charm on them so they could only be killed in numerical order, but children one through three are dead, and Number Four is next. Too bad he's finally gained a friend and a girlfriend and doesn't want to run. At least his newly developing alien powers means there will be screen-ready combat and explosions. Perhaps most idiotic, "author" Pittacus Lore is a character in this fiction—but the first-person narrator is someone else entirely. Maybe this is a natural extension of lightly hidden actual author James Frey's drive to fictionalize his life, but literature it ain't. (Science fiction. 11-13)
Pub Date: Aug. 17, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-06-196955-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2010
Characteristically provocative gothic comedy, with sublime undertones.
An exhilarating summer marked by death, gore and fire sparks deep thoughts in a small-town lad not uncoincidentally named “Jack Gantos.”
The gore is all Jack’s, which to his continuing embarrassment “would spray out of my nose holes like dragon flames” whenever anything exciting or upsetting happens. And that would be on every other page, seemingly, as even though Jack’s feuding parents unite to ground him for the summer after several mishaps, he does get out. He mixes with the undertaker’s daughter, a band of Hell’s Angels out to exact fiery revenge for a member flattened in town by a truck and, especially, with arthritic neighbor Miss Volker, for whom he furnishes the “hired hands” that transcribe what becomes a series of impassioned obituaries for the local paper as elderly town residents suddenly begin passing on in rapid succession. Eventually the unusual body count draws the—justified, as it turns out—attention of the police. Ultimately, the obits and the many Landmark Books that Jack reads (this is 1962) in his hours of confinement all combine in his head to broaden his perspective about both history in general and the slow decline his own town is experiencing.
Characteristically provocative gothic comedy, with sublime undertones. (Autobiographical fiction. 11-13)Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-37993-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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