by Dan Kemp ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 24, 2013
A lighthearted novel that makes for a fine summertime diversion.
Michigan native Kemp offers a hilarious personal story of a madcap summer—disguised as fiction to protect the not-so-innocent.
As a student at Michigan Tech in 1965, Wayne Kallio gets a summer job on remote Isle Royale, a National Park Service island on Lake Superior. Wayne and his buddy Digger are “Yoopers”—natives of Michigan’s isolated Upper Peninsula—and they aren’t strangers to the area’s challenging physical and atmospheric conditions. However, they seem determined to prove their idiocy early by traveling to Isle Royale on the Sisu, Wayne’s tiny 14-foot aluminum boat. Their arrival, after a harrowing journey, sets the tone for their summer as they go on to face disapproval and distrust from local National Park Service rangers; one vindictive, obsequious ranger, nicknamed Dudley, seems determined to catch them on a misdemeanor. Wayne and Digger are told that the first question tourists ask upon their arrival is, “Sonny, where can a person get a drink around here?,” so Wayne decides that he will supplement his meager earnings by selling smuggled beer and whiskey. The pair’s laugh-out-loud antics prove the saying, “God protects idiots and drunks”; they’re cunning, and dumb, in a way that only college men can be. The novel reads like a memoir, with little dialogue and, sometimes, inadequate character development; for example, Wayne describes Kathy, his summer love interest, purely in terms of her physical assets, but readers can only infer, through her continued association with him, that she’s either extraordinarily patient or as crazy as he is. That said, Wayne occasionally strays from his frat-party behavior long enough to reveal that he’s empathetic and has a healthy intellectual curiosity, and Kemp memorably evokes the mid-century setting.
A lighthearted novel that makes for a fine summertime diversion.Pub Date: April 24, 2013
ISBN: 978-1475984408
Page Count: 172
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951
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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