A stultifying amalgam of Peyton Place, The Beans of Egypt, Maine, The Return of the Native, and Tobacco Road. O Canada! O...
Toronto-based Richards (Mercy Among the Children, 2001, etc.), winner of multiple Canadian literary awards, strains both credibility and the reader’s ability to keep a straight face with this pullulating melodrama, published in Canada in 1998.
In an unnamed New Brunswick bayside town, pretty young Karrie Smith’s betrothal to farmer Tommie Donnerel is put on hold when Karrie becomes attracted to glowering Michael Skid, the ne’er-do-well son of a prominent judge. Michael, meanwhile, is smitten with gorgeous slut Madonna Braussard, who, with her Cro-Magnon brother Silver, earns an unpretty penny dealing “bad drugs”—which trade attracts the interest of satanic ex-convict Everette Hutch (“the swirling center, the black hole . . . [which] Madonna and Silver and Michael . . . were being sucked into”). A violent murder rattles the community, and the wrong man is convicted and imprisoned. A sneaky plot twist endangers the gas-station scam practiced by Karrie’s troglodyte parents. Everette crashes his motorcycle, and gives the reader a brief rest by lapsing into a coma. The plot thickens like month-old oatmeal, chickens come home to roost, the guilty are punished, justice delayed is not denied, and the innocent get married and talk it all over 20 years later. These beguiling absurdities are recounted in a burly, barely serviceable prose in which subjects and predicates often remain as far apart as feuding relatives estranged for decades (e.g., this side-winding sentence: “Is that how your new friends who we never see, and who never come to the house, and who all look like refugees, just like you, taught you how to be?”).
A stultifying amalgam of Peyton Place, The Beans of Egypt, Maine, The Return of the Native, and Tobacco Road. O Canada! O Mores!Pub Date: April 1, 2003
ISBN: 1-55970-650-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
"This soil," concludes the young narrator of this quiet chronicle of garrotted innocence, "is bad for all kinds of flowers. Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear." And among the exclusions of white rural Ohio, echoed by black respectability, is ugly, black, loveless, twelve-year-old Pecola. But in a world where blue-eyed gifts are clucked over and admired, and the Pecolas are simply not seen, there is always the possibility of the dream and wish—for blue eyes. Born of a mother who adjusted her life to the clarity and serenity of white households and "acquired virtues that were easy to maintain" and a father, Cholly, stunted by early rejections and humiliations, Pecola just might have been loved—for in raping his daughter Cholly did at least touch her. But "Love is never better than the lover," and with the death of her baby, the child herself, accepting absolutely the gift of blue eyes from a faith healer (whose perverse interest in little girls does not preclude understanding), inches over into madness. A skillful understated tribute to the fall of a sparrow for whose small tragedy there was no watching eye.
Pub Date: Oct. 29, 1970
ISBN: 0375411550
Page Count: -
Publisher: Holt Rinehart & Winston
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1970
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
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