A delightful, amusing fantasy about folks whom everyone ignores.
In this comedic novel, a man vainly tries to get people’s attention.
Hollywood actor Tad Mortriciano receives too much devotion: from his fans, from his dog, and from his overbearing mother. But that all starts to change once the odd, shuttlecock-shaped birthmark on his shoulder begins to darken. Suddenly he can’t get anyone to give him the time of day. He gets rejected for movie roles; fans start to snub him; and his relationships fall apart. People seem unable to grasp what he’s saying or to focus on him at all. His new anonymity is so strong he’s able to resolve a police standoff by simply walking in and freeing the hostages. It gets to the point that when he is greeted by a woman in the library sporting pigtails, dental headgear, and a boom box, Tad just assumes that she’s speaking to someone else. It turns out Angela is in the exact same position as Tad: they are both “Low-Impactors. Folks who others have a hard time paying attention to.” She even has the same shuttlecock-shaped birthmark that appears to be the key to their peculiar situation. One theory is that they’re demons. Another, that they’re aliens. All Angela knows is that they’re being pursued by the Monitors: the only people who can see Low-Impactors and, for some reason, mean to harm them. Angela is helping to organize Low-Impactors who seek to protect themselves in an existential struggle that they are only just beginning to understand. In this first installment of a series, Harris (Tall Grass, 2008, etc.) writes in a sharp, playful prose that fills out this absurd world with color and humor. “It’s obvious,” goes one ally’s alien theory. “You both have red hair, you’re of similar ages, both put up for adoption about the same time, you both have the lunar orbiter birthmark.” The author leans into the strangeness of the premise, delving into an adventure that is simultaneously cartoonish and compelling. The characters are big and fun; the stakes are high but tongue-in-cheek; and the reading experience is escapism of the best variety.
A delightful, amusing fantasy about folks whom everyone ignores.Pub Date: June 19, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5214-5178-6
Page Count: 148
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
