A deceptively simple, clear-eyed story that should find its sympathetic Gullivers.
The revolt of the Houyhnhnms against the Yahoos forms the essential allegorical plot behind fantasist Emshwiller’s astutely crafted, occasionally maudlin latest, on the tail of her fourth story collection (Report to the Men’s Club, p. 901).
The Hoots are the controlling humans who train, administer treats—and also punishment by poling—to their intelligent, sensitive, enslaved Mounts. These are the Sams and Sues of various pedigree—the Seattles being the strongest and most supreme, followed by the swift-footed Tennessees. Yet an insurrection has upset the order of things, and through the first-person voice of the adolescent Smiley, also called Charley, who is the carefully groomed Seattle Mount of the loyal, half-grown Little Master (a.k.a. His Excellent Excellency About-To-Be-The-Ruler-Of-Us-All), we learn that the tamed Mounts have made a violent push for freedom. Suddenly thrust into the wilds with Little Master clinging to his neck, Charley hooks up with the sire he has never known, Beauty, who is the colossally scarred, intractable Seattle and leader of the Mounts’ revolt. Charley is wary of his gruff father, smarting at his inability to love Charley’s mother, Merry Mary, with whom Beauty was forced to mate without love and whom Charley is determined to find, although he never knew her either. Together, Charley, mounted by the clueless Hoot Little Master, Beauty, and Beauty’s kind Tennessee girlfriend Jane, tough it through the wilds and try to avoid recapture by the wily, fork-tongued Hoots. Emshwiller’s peculiar, touching tale becomes a meditation on the virtues of civilization (comforts, discipline, and the principles of conformity) versus freedom and democracy. Which does Charley prefer? In the end he opts for love—and not (gasp!)—for one of his own breed. With patience and enormous affection for her four-legged characters, Emshwiller has fashioned an affecting, plausible story that manages to sidestep a heavy-handed symbolism.
A deceptively simple, clear-eyed story that should find its sympathetic Gullivers.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2002
ISBN: 1-931520-03-8
Page Count: 250
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2002
A luminous novel about the deep value of telling stories.
Two strangers are unknowingly connected by a rare manuscript.
Maxwell Moreau, born to a pirate father and a Dominican immigrant mother in New Orleans in 1920, has a childhood in which he is surrounded by his parents’ stories. His mother, Adana Moreau, learns to read in English with Maxwell at her side. She writes a well-received science fiction novel, Lost City, but becomes gravely ill before finishing the sequel, A Model Earth; she and Maxwell burn the manuscript before she dies . The pirate travels north in search of work, and Maxwell is effectively an orphan when his father fails to meet him as planned in Chicago. Nearly 80 years later, a man named Saul is grieving the death of his grandfather, his only family after his parents were killed in a terrorist attack in Israel. Shortly before dying, his grandfather had asked Saul to mail a package for him to someone named Maxwell Moreau at a university in Chile. When the package is returned some time later, Saul takes on the task of finding Maxwell, now a well-known physicist who theorizes about parallel universes, to give him the papers inside—the same manuscript Adana Moreau had burned so many years earlier—and fulfill his grandfather’s last request. This search takes Saul and his friend Javier to New Orleans just after Hurricane Katrina, and the two reflect on their friendship and Saul’s grandfather’s work as a historian as Javier documents the extensive loss of life in an effort to bear witness. Zapata’s debut novel is a wonderful merging of adventure with thoughtful but urgent meditations on time, history, and surviving tragedy. The characters are richly drawn, and the prose is striking: “They drove east, back the way they had come, and the road seemed to take on an extra-temporal quality, like they were traveling backward in time. We’re already meeting ourselves coming the other way, he thought as the Cadillac sped on and on and on.”
A luminous novel about the deep value of telling stories.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-335-01012-4
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Hanover Square Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 10, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019
There are more than enough quotable lines to fill a couple of reviews.
Berg’s debut is set in an age when telephones were novel.
If you want to make a phone call in 1952, you’ll lift the receiver and hear an operator say “Number, please.” And if you live in Wooster, Ohio, that operator might well be Vivian Dalton. She’ll listen in on your conversation even though she knows she shouldn’t, always hoping to hear “something scandalous.” Her Pawpy had advised “Just don’t get caught,” but her dead granny’s advice (ignored) was better: “Be careful what you wish for.” Vivian wishes for gossip about rich Betty Miller, whose “life was always perfectly in place,” but Betty has a delicious secret about Edward Dalton that’s sure to ruin Vivian’s life. Vivian never finished high school and frets that her bright teenage daughter, Charlotte, will exceed her in life. The narrative is sprinkled with dictionary definitions of fancy words Vivian doesn’t know, like “privy” and “myriad.” She thinks the school has assigned pornography to Charlotte when she sees The Myth of Sisyphus and thinks it’s about syphilis. Meanwhile, Betty is ever so full of herself because her father owns a bank and the ladies of Wooster always accept her written invitations. She briefly considers calling her Christmas party “Savior’s Celebratory Soirée.” Then she hosts a special afternoon tea to reveal the news about Vivian’s husband to a group of ladies “well versed in the art of displaying false concern.” Berg’s storytelling is warm, sympathetic, and witty—Vivian's "fear had eaten her common sense like it was a casserole,” and her “rage had melted and cooled a little into a hardened shell of shame and humiliation.” Vivian hires a private investigator to look into her husband’s past and consequently deletes chocolate from all her recipes. (Well, it makes sense to her.)
There are more than enough quotable lines to fill a couple of reviews.Pub Date: March 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-297894-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 25, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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