A brilliant conceit never finds the right seriocomic groove.
Can the secret of better living be found in the pages of ultra-niche magazines? One man spends many low-pay, high-angst years finding out in Haas’s debut.
Henry Bay’s career in the glory-free world of enthusiast rags like Crochet Life, Wakeboarding and Monster Truck Tunin’ begins in college. He’s initially interested in studying law so he can sue the aerospace company that laid off his father, but his experiences in a sport that mixes off-roading and parasailing prompts him to move from California to Illinois to work at Kite Buggy magazine. “There’s a magazine as soon as five people find a new way to hurt themselves,” Henry notes, and the author has great fun inventing both obscure publications like Cozy, the Magazine of Tea and the off-kilter people who fill their pages. (One woman crochets throws that depict violent crimes; the editor of Exotic Pets runs an office where a turtle, a kinkajou and a fennec fox mingle with the staff.) Haas has so much fun, in fact, that the thin plot feels like an afterthought. Henry’s older brother Barney is a brilliant scientist who acts out against his suffocating wife by engaging in the kind of extreme sports Henry covers, and their fate is tied to a Unabomber type who darts in and out of the narrative. The novel’s message is clear: Our lives are often lived most sincerely in the hobby-obsessed margins, and the happiest relationships are with those who indulge our quirks. Yet neither Barney nor Henry’s love interest are much more fully sketched than the staffers at the enthusiast magazines, and Henry is an ungainly mix of good intentions and absurdity; the reader loses count of just how many low-circulation magazines he works at in how many small towns. His character rarely feels like more than a repository for Haas’s riffs on subcultures, though Henry’s sincerity keeps the novel from degrading into farce.
A brilliant conceit never finds the right seriocomic groove.Pub Date: June 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-06-171182-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2009
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
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