A disturbing but unflinching look at youthful disquiet.
A troubled teen menaces his sleepy town by deliberately starting major fires.
Zeke Titcomb is an awkward, portly 15-year-old pulverized under the weight of social alienation. His father, Eben, is tyrannically boorish and abusive, and his mother, Peggy, is interminably sheepish in the face of his dominance. His sister, Michelle, both beautiful and smart, rebels against Eben through wanton promiscuity. Zeke’s both tortured and ignored by his peers. He is painfully private, concealing his emotions as they simmer over time into a roiling boil. He decides to set his own school on fire and delights in the feeling of power the act of destruction brings him. Zeke makes arson attempts on other schools and a warehouse and then turns his attention to private residences, until he finally burns down his own home. Chaldea, Maine—a small, failed paper-mill town—is yanked out of its peaceful slumber by Zeke’s reign of terror. Word gets out that Chaldea is essentially under siege, and a reporter from the Boston Globe visits to investigate. Zeke glories in the combination of anonymous cunning and empowerment he experiences: “I would never threaten anyone. How can I? I’m invisible.” Eventually, Zeke is apprehended by the authorities, who are chilled to the bone by his steely remove. A court-appointed psychiatrist, Dr. Elizabeth Proctor, struggles to get Zeke to open up, and finally he finds his voice while writing in a journal. Proctor enlists the aid of two figures Zeke admires, one a librarian and the other an English teacher. Will Zeke finally allow a modest portal into his distempered mind? Cappella (Gobbo: A Solitaire’s Opera, 2005, etc.) leaps back and forth from the unfolding drama to Zeke’s journal entries, poignantly depicting the adolescent rage that snowballs within him. Zeke’s angst regarding his sister is especially complex and affecting: he’s embarrassed by her exploits, hurt they’re not closer, worried she’s squandering her talents, and sadly reminded by her of his own failure with the opposite sex. The author intelligently resists any neatly delivered conclusions—this is a thoughtful, serious, but less than inspirational tale that realistically captures the chaos of teen disaffectedness.
A disturbing but unflinching look at youthful disquiet.Pub Date: Dec. 7, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-944393-05-2
Page Count: 298
Publisher: Piscataqua Press
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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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