Steinke brings the world of Bent Tree to vivid life with a cast of secondary characters more sharply drawn than Jesse and...
Steinke (Milk, 2005, etc.) ponders the nature of religious faith in this coming-of-age story about a defrocked New-Age minister’s daughter’s adjusting to her family’s new life in suburban Virginia in the early 1970s.
In 1972, 12-year-old Jesse moves with her parents and 4-year-old brother, Philip, from Philadelphia, where her father has once again been fired for his unconventional methods and beliefs as a Methodist minister, to Roanoke, Virginia, where he has found work as a counselor. While he is an intellectual idealist unable or unwilling to function in the practical world, Jesse’s deeply frustrated, emotionally erratic mother craves respectability and material comfort. Their marriage seems unhappy to Jesse, but their basic decency shows in bits and pieces throughout the novel. Having settled into Bent Tree, an apartment complex where the motley mix of residents struggles to pay the rent, innocent yet precocious Jesse begins seventh grade desperate to fit in but also afraid of her body’s pubescent changes. After popular Sheila rebuffs her, Jesse becomes soul mates with Jill, who believes her family has been cursed. Unfortunately true to Jill’s beliefs, her alcoholic mother disappears, leaving Jill and her younger siblings to fend for themselves until someone (maybe Jesse’s mom) calls in social services and Jill exits from Jesse’s life. Three years later, Sheila, whose popularity has faded since a scandal surrounding her dad’s sexuality, draws Jesse into her fantasy life involving Playboy Bunnies and her own incipient sadomasochism. Jesse also begins a relationship with potentially dangerous but pathetic bad-boy Dwayne. But by 10th grade, Jesse has turned into the accelerated student with smart friends she was always meant to be. Then Jill, now a devout born-again Christian, reappears to confuse and challenge the beliefs (or lack thereof) that Jesse’s been struggling with all along.
Steinke brings the world of Bent Tree to vivid life with a cast of secondary characters more sharply drawn than Jesse and particularly her parents, who are never quite fully realized on the page.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-935639-94-7
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Tin House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 13, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2014
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
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
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SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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