Brilliant, frightening and skillfully written.
In this beautifully written debut novel, a loner hides from the world, other people and his past until a chance relationship sends him spiraling toward a confrontation with inner demons and the outside world.
Ben floats, adrift in a world of routine, solitude and ennui. Reminiscent of Sartre’s Nausea (1938), the intimate prose conjures this outsider’s life into stark reality. Readers are thrown drowning into the maelstrom that is his mind—a mind constantly churning, focusing in microscopic detail on every word, deed and nuance. “He tried to think of something more to say. He was supposed to say more. But he couldn’t think of anything, and the weight of saying nothing got heavier and heavier until it was like a panic.” For Ben, life is like a bad acid trip, and Di Biase drags the reader along for the ride. The story is divided between the present and flashbacks in which Ben is referred to as “the boy,” who is as introspective and self-conscious as the man, though somehow fresher, as if things today didn’t have to be this way. In the present, Ben is a mechanic at a Washington, D.C., garage, where co-workers call him Cornpone. “Ben liked working. Not having to think.” He prefers old cars and keeping to himself; at night, he sits at home drinking Maker’s Mark. Sometimes he goes to a bar where patrons call him President Taft. There, he meets Maria, a woman much like his mother. Ben resists but falls into a relationship with her and meets her daughter, Sophia. Throughout, Di Biase builds tension that reverberates and tightens, ever alluding to some unnamed crime Ben committed as a boy. “It might have been different. If he’d turned out differently, or if he hadn’t done what he’d done.” The writing mirrors Ben’s agitated state, infecting readers with his anxiety. Put squarely inside a troubled mind, readers can’t escape the fearsome knowledge that something bad is coming.
Brilliant, frightening and skillfully written.Pub Date: Sept. 14, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-9895360-9-7
Page Count: 248
Publisher: The Apparent Sublime
Review Posted Online: March 18, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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