The protagonist’s troubled back story is well-trod territory, but his uncertain future keeps things lively.
In debut author Viceconte’ coming-of-age novel, a teenager’s attempt at redemption leads him from suburbia to jail to a shaky future.
How did David, a 16-year-old with a loving father who grew up in the safe suburbs of Connecticut, come to get caught trying to transport four pounds of marijuana out of New York City? Prior to his arrest, David had been kicked out of a boarding school in New Hampshire for fighting and was having trouble adjusting to life back in Connecticut. He felt like a stranger in his hometown and was failing most of his classes. Lucky for David, in the eyes of the law, he is a minor, and in the eyes of his father, James, he is a smart kid who made a mistake. James sends David to a program for troubled teens called Blue Ridge Outdoors. David will hike in the woods, learn how to start a fire without matches, and become accustomed to life without cigarettes. The exorbitant program is run by a shifty, closeted alcoholic named Paul, but where else can a boy with a violent past and a rap sheet straighten out? The opening chapters of the book, in which the reader learns about David and his degenerate friends, teems with characters Bret Easton Ellis might have dreamed up. The problem is that even the most degenerate of the bunch—a boy named Steven who gets into his own drug-fueled trouble with the law—would likely get laughed out of Less Than Zero for being too soft. The story picks up immensely with David’s departure for Blue Ridge Outdoors. Ellis (and writers who emulate him) have created young people that have done unspeakable things, but what would happen if you sent such youngsters into the forest for reform? David’s time in the program is full of possibilities. David is told not to concern himself with what lies ahead (“No FI, No Future Information” one of his counselors explains), and the reader, likewise, is kept guessing about how things will unfold for the reckless teenager. The suspense comes in finding out what David must do to succeed and what kind of person he’ll be when it’s all over.
The protagonist’s troubled back story is well-trod territory, but his uncertain future keeps things lively.Pub Date: July 10, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5214-1799-7
Page Count: 271
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A presold prefab blockbuster, what with King's Carrie hitting the moviehouses, Salem's Lot being lensed, The Shining itself sold to Warner Bros. and tapped as a Literary Guild full selection, NAL paperback, etc. (enough activity to demand an afterlife to consummate it all).
The setting is The Overlook, a palatial resort on a Colorado mountain top, snowbound and closed down for the long, long winter. Jack Torrance, a booze-fighting English teacher with a history of violence, is hired as caretaker and, hoping to finish a five-act tragedy he's writing, brings his wife Wendy and small son Danny to the howling loneliness of the half-alive and mad palazzo. The Overlook has a gruesome past, scenes from which start popping into the present in various suites and the ballroom. At first only Danny, gifted with second sight (he's a "shiner"), can see them; then the whole family is being zapped by satanic forces. The reader needs no supersight to glimpse where the story's going as King's formula builds to a hotel reeling with horrors during Poesque New Year's Eve revelry and confetti outta nowhere....
Back-prickling indeed despite the reader's unwillingness at being mercilessly manipulated.
Pub Date: Jan. 28, 1976
ISBN: 0385121679
Page Count: 453
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1976
PERSPECTIVES
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
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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