A classic novel of the West, written with quiet muscle and confidence.
A quietly haunting first novel set in a small ranching town, by the author of Any Small Thing Can Save You (stories: 2001).
Lenna Swanson brings her 14-year-old son Kenny to the unnamed Idaho town after an ugly divorce leaves her penniless. Kenny still adores his father, an Air Force pilot whose visit to take the boy hunting is heartbreaking, as is Kenny’s bittersweet preadolescent loyalty to Lenna. All the kid wants to do is rodeo, but he’s promised he won’t risk riding injuries until his mother’s new job insurance kicks in. Kenny feels lonely, especially after his father dies in a plane crash, and so does Lenna. Soon she finds herself involved with Roddy Moyers, a local rodeo cowboy idolized by Kenny as well as almost everyone else in town. Roddy, who has the kind of easy charisma that lets him get away with anything (too easily for his own good), is also seeing Cynthia Dustin, a senior with musical talent who dreams of escaping her brutal father Earl and has secretly applied for a college scholarship. On Christmas Eve, Cynthia runs into Lenna and Roddy together at the local tavern while Kenny, alone at home, discovers a box of his father’s mementos that sends him over the edge of despair. Roddy leaves town and his messy love life to rejoin the rodeo circuit. Kenny and Cynthia become friends and go to the vacant ranch Roddy’s wealthy parents own so Cynthia can play the baby grand. There, they fall asleep and are discovered; Earl assumes the worst even though nothing untoward has happened. Relationships unravel and re-knit. Cynthia leaves town for good; Roddy and the Swansons remain, facing their future with ambiguous optimism. The strength here lies less in plot details, although the author nimbly handles connections, than in the power of her language and reticent yet fully realized characters.
A classic novel of the West, written with quiet muscle and confidence.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2003
ISBN: 0-316-73500-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2003
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
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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