Perfect for those who like their eggs scrambled, steak rare and thrillers hammy.
A madcap criminal caper involving a $100-million lottery ticket and the quirkiest cast of characters since Seinfeld.
Widower and retired cop Mack Durgin moves to Arizona, figuring it’s a good place to relax and get away from his previous life. Fate had other plans, however, in the form of a large, ponytailed ex-con with a penchant for violence and junk food and an aversion to good hygiene: Dieter Kohl (aka Diet Cola), who happens to be standing near Mack’s parents when they learn that they have the winning ticket in a $100-million lottery. When the octogenarian couple heads home to celebrate with a bit of coitus, Cola breaks in to steal the ticket and proceeds to savagely beat the poor Durgins–though the plucky pair is rescued by two unlikely saviors: brothers Ace and Frosty, a dim but efficient pair of thieves cursed with a modicum of conscience. Cola manages to hide the ticket in an urn before escaping, but doesn’t realize said urn contains the remains of Mack’s former partner (the aptly named George Ashe). Mack’s parents ship the urn to him in Arizona, setting off a sequence of lively cross-country hijinks, with Cola desperately trying to reclaim the ticket before it expires, and Ace and Frosty hot on his heels. Throw in Mack’s vivacious love interest, Calliope Vrattos–a 40-something divorcee on the run from a deranged Elvis impersonator–and a pig named Poindexter, and you’ve got a crime story that manages to provide a few delightfully unpredictable moments before reaching its tritely inevitable conclusion. Sanchez’s breakneck narrative never lets up as it propels its characters toward their respective destinies, and there’s humor to be found within the criminal caricatures. Unfortunately, a number of one-liners induce more groans than giggles, and the story’s sheer absurdity occasionally weighs it down.
Perfect for those who like their eggs scrambled, steak rare and thrillers hammy.Pub Date: Nov. 9, 2006
ISBN: 0-595-40770-6
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Feb. 10, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.
The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.
Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence.
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985
ISBN: 038549081X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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