PLB 0-688-13974-4 Stutson’s rhymed depiction of the cowboy’s life on the range is merry, but the watercolor locales steal the show. The text is unintrusive: “Rising slowly, cowpokes wake./Boots and vests and leather chaps./Bright bandanna. Cow poke hats./Eating flapjacks stack by stack.” San Souci sets the cowpokes’ actions the big open: mesas in the distance, aromatic sage, the blue sky high and wide. His cowpokes (among them, Austin, who is “quieter than a hole in the ground,”) are good time, strong-jawed caricatures. These pages offer a notion of how cowboys spend their days and a distinct sense of the Western landscape, which beckons enticingly. It is a fusion of text and art that works admirably well. (Picture book. 2-4)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-688-13973-6
Page Count: 24
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1999
It’s all meant to be self-consciously amusing, but much of the humor is tedious, and quirks stand in for character.
A novel of pizza parlors, skateboarding, tattoos and piercings—needless to say, it’s a portrait of the ’90s.
Narrator When Thinfinger is the eponymous character. He’s a denizen of Florida, lover of Marigold, friend of Blaise and aficionado of skateboards and street bikes, his favorite being a “Haro with the kinky triangular frame.” Although he’s recently lost his job as pit cook at Ken’s Barbie-Q, life is looking up when he finds a position as Ovenman at Piecemeal Pizza By The Slice, a microcosm of the weird subculture When inhabits. This is the kind of place where people are identified by their social or culinary functions rather than by their names—or rather, their function becomes their names: Thin Pie Guy, Pasta Dude, Front Girl, Salad Bitch. Ovenman literally makes notes of things (“Pizza is Power”; “I am Ovenman”) all on post-its that he puts on whatever surface is available, including his body. The plot is episodic: Marigold breaks her back trying a maneuver on a bike (at Ovenman’s behest); Ovenman tries to get away with whatever funds he can embezzle from Piecemeal; Ovenman gets pierced against his will in the most painful place imaginable at Second Skin Piercing; Ovenman seeks out his “biodad” in Ohio for an abortive homecoming. Ovenman tends to simplify life to conform to his self-acknowledged limitations. When he sets a lock combination, for example, it must be 23-3-7 because it’s the only one he can remember. (It spells “beer” on a telephone.) He describes a shirt as having a smell of “total MoonPie wrapper.” In a spasm of insight toward the end of the novel, Ovenman exclaims: “Suddenly I am risking my job, the only real connection I have to anything in this life.” At least here he acknowledges that the stakes are fairly high.
It’s all meant to be self-consciously amusing, but much of the humor is tedious, and quirks stand in for character.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-9776989-2-9
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Tin House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
Even Buckley fans might suspect that he’s begun to crank them out a little too quickly.
As before, Buckley (Boomsday, 2007, etc.) blurs the line distinguishing the historical, the plausible and the preposterous amid the political circus of anything-goes Washington.
The satiric scenario has plenty of potential, but sketchy characters and slapdash plotting result in a split decision. On a Supreme Court as divided as the country, President Donald Vanderdamp finds his first two nominees to fill a crucial vacancy rejected on the shakiest of grounds (one wrote a grade-school review of To Kill a Mockingbird and found parts of the movie “kind of boring”). With his popularity at an all-time low and with no intention of running for a second term, the president then dares the Senate to reject his third nominee, America’s most popular jurist, Pepper Cartwright of television’s highly rated Courtroom Six. After she sails through the confirmation process, both the new justice and the novel seem to lose their way. Instead of relying on the common sense and colloquial language that have made her such a hit as a TV personality, she tries her best to apply legal precedent befitting the Supreme Court, thus alienating many of her fellow justices and most of the public. She also becomes estranged from her husband, a reality-show producer, and involved with the chief justice, whose wife left him for a woman immediately after the court sanctioned gay marriage. After a politician-turned-TV-actor challenges for the presidency, the novel inevitably reaches its climax as the contested race is left to the court to decide. Yet questions remain: Why is the president so unpopular? (He vetoes every spending bill, which would surely enrage Congress, but shouldn’t upset the public.) Why does Pepper take all the heat for every split decision? (Four other justices vote with her, and the court had a history of 5-4 decisions before her arrival.) Why does Buckley think it’s enough to give his characters funny names (Blyster Forkmorgan, Esquire, et al.) rather than develop them?
Even Buckley fans might suspect that he’s begun to crank them out a little too quickly.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-446-57982-7
Page Count: 292
Publisher: Twelve
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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