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LOST ON A PAGE

A lovingly designed metafictional sendup of genre novels.

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A debut metafictional fantasy tells the story of a private investigator plucked out of his own book.

Joe Slade is the prototypical hard-boiled detective: street-smart, tough, wisecracking, and jaded. He’s attempting to solve his latest case when three strangers—emphasis on strange—step in and solve it for him. They seem to know everything about him, in fact. He agrees to go with them to their hideout to discuss a proposition they have for him. That’s when things get really weird: Time and space begin to warp, and he ends up in an impossibly large library filled with an infinite number of books. Even some volumes about himself. Joe Slade, they tell him, is the main character in a series of detective novels by an author named Ben Westing. These strangers—who turn out to be a wizard, an elf, and a dwarf—are characters in a fantasy novel by an author named Howard Zagny. “You’ve already seen we are able to escape from our own book,” the wizard tells Joe. “With your help, we will escape from all books. We’ll go there. To the world where the books are written. There we will confront our authors and live lives that we will write with our own hands.” What follows is their escapade across genres—romance, sci-fi, horror, and more—to literally meet their makers. Along the way, Joe has the opportunity to defy the tropes he’s been shackled with and find out just what sort of hero he really is. Sharp writes in a mercurial prose that morphs to fit each genre the characters travel through. He finds creative ways to portray these metafictional shifts, as here, when the narration switches from Joe’s first-person perspective to the third person: “Joe could not shake an unnameable strangeness that had settled upon him. His thoughts seemed more distant, less audible within his own mind. It was as though some kind of mental fog had settled upon his consciousness and would not relinquish its grip.” The book is clever, amusing, surprising, and genuinely fun: an old-time adventure that will keep readers on their toes while leaving the door open for any and all possibilities.

A lovingly designed metafictional sendup of genre novels.

Pub Date: May 17, 2018

ISBN: 978-1-71953-015-6

Page Count: 298

Publisher: CreateSpace

Review Posted Online: Aug. 7, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2018

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TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

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

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A LITTLE LIFE

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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