A none-too-bright protagonist rises (with a vengeance) to the rococo occasion in another overblown thriller from Jones (In Deep, 1991, etc.). Would-be playwright Chris Nielson and his baby-makes-three family have moved from southern California to the foothills of the Colorado Rockies; their lakeside A-frame, supposedly inherited by Chris's enigmatic wife Matty, is invaded of an autumn afternoon by a mysterious stranger named Frank Springer. Initially introduced as Matty's cousin, the glib intruder soon claims to be her husband and bars Chris from his own home. An outraged Chris gets no help in asserting his rights from either the local police or Matty (a lady with a past who fears for the safety of her infant son Nicky). At wit's end, he eventually falls in with CIA operative Sarah Rawlings. She offers to aid him in return for his help in killing a wily Russian arms-dealer whom Springer (a freelance hit man) let off the hook. Desperate, Chris accepts her bizarre deal and tracks his quarry to a mountain lair where he manages to best him in hand- to-hand combat during a blizzard. Unfortunately, the suggestible hero's troubles are far from over, since Sarah dies in the violent course of the successful assassination. With timely assistance from aging but adventurous attorney Abe Goldstein, however, Chris soldiers on while the homicidal Springer dispatches inconvenient witnesses and degrades Matty (to whom he was indeed married) with kinky sexual demands. At wearisome length, Chris and his estranged wife, sporadically in touch, hatch a complicated plot to slay their maniacal nemesis. Approved by Goldstein, the scheme involves luring Springer to Niagara Falls (where he honeymooned with Matty) for a cliff-hanging confrontation marked (among other things) by a last- minute rescue of little Nicky. An eventful thriller that's almost too silly for words.
Pub Date: Dec. 11, 1996
ISBN: 0-525-94231-9
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1996
Catch-22 is also concerned with some of war's horrors and atrocities, and it is at times painfully grim.
Catch-22 is an unusual, wildly inventive comic novel about World War II, and its publishers are planning considerable publicity for it.
Set on the tiny island of Pianosa in the Mediterranean Sea, the novel is devoted to a long series of impossible, illogical adventures engaged in by the members of the 256th bombing squadron, an unlikely combat group whose fanatical commander, Colonel Cathcart, keeps increasing the men's quota of missions until they reach the ridiculous figure of 80. The book's central character is Captain Yossarian, the squadron's lead bombardier, who is surrounded at all times by the ironic and incomprehensible and who directs all his energies towards evading his odd role in the war. His companions are an even more peculiar lot: Lieutenant Scheisskopf, who loved to win parades; Major Major Major, the victim of a life-long series of practical jokes, beginning with his name; the mess officer, Milo Minderbinder, who built a food syndicate into an international cartel; and Major de Coverley whose mission in life was to rent apartments for the officers and enlisted men during their rest leaves. Eventually, after Cathcart has exterminated nearly all of Yossarian's buddies through the suicidal missions, Yossarian decides to desert — and he succeeds.
Catch-22 is also concerned with some of war's horrors and atrocities, and it is at times painfully grim.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 1961
ISBN: 0684833395
Page Count: 468
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1961
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Kin “[find] each other’s lives inscrutable” in this rich, sharp story about the way identity is formed.
Inseparable identical twin sisters ditch home together, and then one decides to vanish.
The talented Bennett fuels her fiction with secrets—first in her lauded debut, The Mothers (2016), and now in the assured and magnetic story of the Vignes sisters, light-skinned women parked on opposite sides of the color line. Desiree, the “fidgety twin,” and Stella, “a smart, careful girl,” make their break from stultifying rural Mallard, Louisiana, becoming 16-year-old runaways in 1954 New Orleans. The novel opens 14 years later as Desiree, fleeing a violent marriage in D.C., returns home with a different relative: her 8-year-old daughter, Jude. The gossips are agog: “In Mallard, nobody married dark....Marrying a dark man and dragging his blueblack child all over town was one step too far.” Desiree's decision seals Jude’s misery in this “colorstruck” place and propels a new generation of flight: Jude escapes on a track scholarship to UCLA. Tending bar as a side job in Beverly Hills, she catches a glimpse of her mother’s doppelgänger. Stella, ensconced in White society, is shedding her fur coat. Jude, so Black that strangers routinely stare, is unrecognizable to her aunt. All this is expertly paced, unfurling before the book is half finished; a reader can guess what is coming. Bennett is deeply engaged in the unknowability of other people and the scourge of colorism. The scene in which Stella adopts her White persona is a tour de force of doubling and confusion. It calls up Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, the book's 50-year-old antecedent. Bennett's novel plays with its characters' nagging feelings of being incomplete—for the twins without each other; for Jude’s boyfriend, Reese, who is trans and seeks surgery; for their friend Barry, who performs in drag as Bianca. Bennett keeps all these plot threads thrumming and her social commentary crisp. In the second half, Jude spars with her cousin Kennedy, Stella's daughter, a spoiled actress.
Kin “[find] each other’s lives inscrutable” in this rich, sharp story about the way identity is formed.Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-53629-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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