A haunting novel, original and deeply sad.
Three scrappy outsiders—inextricably bonded less by circumstance than by love—struggle to survive in the sweat-drenched underbelly of Athens’ red light district in the late 1980s.
“We were looking for nothing and had found it in Athens,” explains Bridey Sullivan in the opening pages of Hoffman’s (Be Safe I Love You, 2014, etc.) third novel. She is 17, smart and wild and self-contained, feral, a survivor. She has come to Athens to escape the bizarre trauma of her childhood, raised by a kindly doomsday-planning uncle, a smoke jumper, in the far reaches of Washington state. When she meets Jasper, a British expat, an Eton dropout, on a train, she is immediately taken in by his beauty; his is “the kind of elegant placid face you saw in old portraits.” Jasper’s boyfriend is Milo, another Brit, a teenage boxer from Manchester. They scrape by as runners—hustlers who trawl trains for tourists to entice back to dumpy hotels in exchange for their own rooms and board; in love with each other, they form a kind of family, drunken and desperate but free, tied to nothing, loyal only to their own. But their grimy, sweaty sort of equilibrium cannot last, of course, and when one of their money-making schemes links them to a deadly act of terrorism, the trio is forced apart. The novel, sticky with the stultifying heat of Athens, oozes backward and forward in time and place: gritty 1980s Athens, Bridey’s troubled childhood in Washington, and contemporary New York City, where Milo, now a successful poet, is in residence at the New School, drowning his sorrows in a never-ending stream of Four Loko. Crisp and immediate, the New York segments are a welcome contrast to the action in Greece, which is so beautiful and atmospheric that it sometimes feels as though it’s happening behind a screen.
A haunting novel, original and deeply sad.Pub Date: Feb. 21, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4767-5757-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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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