Another fairy tale for grown-ups fond of Victorian waif-to- well-being tales featuring the deserving poor and plain, the beautiful, rich, and wicked, and other lurking ogres. This time out, the ever popular Cookson (My Beloved Son; The Love Child, etc.) offers the saga of a wee lass headed for trouble—all beginning in an 1854 English mill village. Millie Forester, first seen here at seven when her poor mother is forced to streetwalk for food, finds a reluctant protector in Agnes Winkowski, aka ``Raggie Aggie,'' a Tugboat Annie type who peddles rags from the remains of the old family farmhouse, which also shelters Ben, 17, taken in when he was a small lad. Millie's Ma commits suicide, and a brothel owner is after the beautiful child, so it's off to a convent school—an education finished when Millie kicks a virulent nun in the shins. Then when Millie is 16, she's happily working as a nursemaid nearby—until at a servants' party, the wife of a mill owner directs some terrible sexual antics. So it's home again and a rich suitor—in spite of the objections of sturdy and saintly Ben, possessor of all the manly virtues if physically a bit short. Two monster men will then rustle the grass—a long-lost father and that old devil brothel procurer- -but there's that Cookson specialty on the way: the last-minute rescue. With dialogue ripe and rugged: a grand groaner for the faithful.
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-671-86477-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1993
Borrowing from Faust, the Iliad and Gran Torino, Mosley (Known to Evil, 2010, etc.) unforgettably transforms Ptolemy’s...
An ancient man living in solitary squalor in Los Angeles is offered an experimental medicine that just might beat back his creeping dementia—and will almost certainly kill him in the process.
At 91, Ptolemy Grey has outlived everyone he ever cared for. His uncle and mentor, Coydog McCann, was lynched back in Mississippi when Li’l Pea was only a child; his much younger wife, Sensia Howard, had a fatal stroke 22 years ago; and as his story opens, he’s summoned to the side of his much-loved son Reggie, his last link with the outside world, killed in a drive-by shooting. Unable to get services from the landlord who’s frustrated that he can’t raise the rent and afraid to go out alone lest he run into Melinda Hogarth, the crazy addict who keeps mugging him, Ptolemy lives amid an unending flood of uncontrolled memories and associations that render his mind as unusable as his clogged toilet. But his life turns around when he meets Robyn Small at Reggie’s wake. An orphan taken in by Ptolemy’s niece Niecie, Robyn has already, at 17, lived through as tempestuous a life as Ptolemy. But she’s emerged from its vicissitudes clear-eyed, tough-minded and eager to help the old man who claims her as a daughter. She cleans and fumigates his reeking apartment, sets up a bank account for the cash he’s socked away and takes him to see Dr. Bryant Ruben, the satanic physician who offers Ptolemy a medical therapy unapproved by the FDA that may improve his memory and his cognition, but at a high price. Robyn is shocked and repelled, but Ptolemy, who’s named after Cleopatra’s father, is eager to get something like his old life back.
Borrowing from Faust, the Iliad and Gran Torino, Mosley (Known to Evil, 2010, etc.) unforgettably transforms Ptolemy’s cacophony of memories into a powerful symphony that makes him “into many men from out of all the lives he had lived through the decades.”Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-59448-772-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Sept. 9, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The latest from a generation of literary novelists who are erasing the distinction between art and pulp.
The zombie genre provides unlikely inspiration for the author’s creative renewal.
Whitehead (Sag Harbor, 2009, etc.) never writes the same book twice, though his eclectic output had fallen short of the promise he flashed in his early novels (The Intuitionist, 1998, etc.). Yet here he sinks his teeth into a popular format and emerges with a literary feast, producing his most compulsively readable work to date. Though there’s enough chomp-and-spurt gorefest to satiate fans of the format, Whitehead transforms the zombie novel into an allegory of contemporary Manhattan (and, by extension, America), where “it was the business of the plague to reveal our family members, friends, and neighbors as the creatures they had always been” and the never-explained apocalypse “sentenced you to observe the world through the sad aperture of the dead, suffer the gross parody of your existence.” The reader’s guide through this particular circle of hell is a clean-up/extermination operative called Mark Spitz (for reasons that aren’t worth the elaborate explanation the novel eventually gives). He was formerly employed as a social-network functionary for a Starbucks-style coffee chain, an occupation that seems even more ludicrous in the wake of a society transformed by hordes of organ-eating zombies. (A colleague’s former occupation was “a sommelier at a high-end eatery in Cambridge that specialized in offal.”) With its savage sense of humor and thematic ambitions, the narrative is to contemporary zombie novels what the movies of George Romero are to other zombie flicks. As survivors of the “Last Night” struggle through “PASD, or Post-Apocalyptic Stress Disorder," the government (located in Buffalo) peddles hope in the form of its “American Phoenix Rising” campaign, with its own power-ballad anthem: “Stop! Can You Hear the Eagle Roar? (Theme from Reconstruction).” When the protagonist was a child, he asked his father the meaning of the word “apocalypse.” His father replied, “It means that in the future, things will be even worse than they are now.” And, sure enough, they are.
The latest from a generation of literary novelists who are erasing the distinction between art and pulp.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-385-52807-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2011
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