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CAVEMAN AT THE END OF THE WORLD

Name: CAVEMAN AT THE END OF THE WORLD
Author: Brad Rau
ISBN: 978-0-692-88431-7

by Brad Rau ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 15, 2017

A conspiracy story buoyed by childlike weirdness and heart.

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This surreal fantasy finds a woman legally bound to a short, hairy man of unknown origin.

Ella Pearson lives in the City, though she’d love nothing more than to farm or roam the beach. She’s a marketing executive, dating a kind (if oblivious) man named Andy, whose young daughter, Clara, loves to tinker with broken appliances. One night, having decided to break up with Andy, Ella returns to their apartment to find someone in Clara’s room. The intruder is “exceptionally hairy, but so diminutive, with pudgy cheeks, as though he were equal parts chipmunk and man.” Ella wonders if her prescription of Represitol hasn’t triggered hallucinations or paranoia but calls the police anyway. When it’s revealed that Clara let the caveman inside the apartment, the police tell Ella that his removal is now a task for Social Services. Meanwhile, someone has vandalized the Temple of the First Assembly, and Ella’s firm, CCI, helps with the church’s response. When Ella’s boss, Warner, notices her exhaustion, he suggests a vacation to East Gish, her hometown. Later, she finds a picture of a childhood friend, Timmy Crace, and wonders why she barely recalls him. In his absurd, endearing tale, Rau (The Ghost, Josephine, 2015) pokes fun at religion, officialdom, and parenthood while examining life’s larger questions. His vicious sense of humor, clearly not intended to please everyone, is incisive, as when churchgoers fill the pews “with the rote order of overfed livestock.” The author’s dedication to portraying bureaucracy as inane is commendable, to the point where the reader wishes Ella would just slap Agent Sickens from the Office of Sentient Affairs (“Ms. Pearson, if that’s what the file says, then that’s where you live”). As a nightmarish plot surrounds Ella, she learns to detest the caveman (eventually named Ernie) less and less. Rau succeeds in drawing readers into his woolly world, but the audience will need patience while the narrative gropes for a stopping point.

A conspiracy story buoyed by childlike weirdness and heart.

Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2017

ISBN: 978-0-692-88431-7

Page Count: 435

Publisher: SmallPub

Review Posted Online: Aug. 1, 2017

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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SUMMER ISLAND

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2001

The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...

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Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.

Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.

The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.

Pub Date: March 1, 2001

ISBN: 0-609-60737-5

Page Count: 336

Publisher: Crown

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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LAST ORDERS

by Graham Swift ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 5, 1996

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Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.