A witty, Rabelaisian road story about one man’s search for what matters.
This debut novel follows a young mountain climber’s unconventional quest for enlightenment.
The story introduces readers to Donato, a young man with a mission. After a thunderegg (a sort of geode) falls from a tree on the same day he fails to save a young calf’s life, Donato vows to find the place where souls go when they vanish. The calf’s soul “didn’t go down, it didn’t go sidewise, and it didn’t go into outer space, but it did go up.” In search of this mysterious up, Donato travels the world, first as a student, then as a Navy SEAL, then as a sculptor. His journey takes him from Oregon’s Cascade Range to Mount Bundok in the Philippines to the Dolomite Mountains outside Padua, Italy, and then back to the American Northwest. Many years and many mountains later, he is still looking for answers: “Up seemed just as elusive and intangible as ever, and I wondered if I would ever find it.” Ultimately, he does discover it, and in exactly the place where he least expected to. Among the curious characters readers meet along the way are the hero’s parents, lovable eccentrics Yango and Clotho, who tell young Donato about the mystical Nagah sheep, a bighorn who climbed down a fissure in a mountain and emerged as the North Star. Nagah serves as a sort of governing spirit for the story, an otherworldly but ultimately benevolent lodestar. Mulch writes about Donato’s search in a whimsical, absurdist style with plenty of jokes and fierce exaggerations (stones that float, an anthropomorphic tree frog, and a wise Elf who makes killer veggie burgers all appear in Chapter 15, and that chapter is not an outlier). Mulch operates here very much in the tradition of the American tall tale; there is no blue ox in the book, but there could have been. A grumpy social satire peppers portions of the tale’s second half—the author laments the yuppification of Portland, Oregon, at length. Some readers may find the jokes here underdeveloped and the satire a bit too vague but most should smile throughout this unusual adventure.
A witty, Rabelaisian road story about one man’s search for what matters.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-615-93563-8
Page Count: 252
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 21, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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