A storyteller mastering his craft.
Eight tales of youthful heartache and road-trip escapades from the Michigan rapper, filmmaker and creator of Found (www.foundmagazine.com).
The young male narrators in this spare, somber debut collection are restless, unsettled and often from sticky home situations. The teenager who narrates “Maggie Fever” is sent to live with his grandfather in Albuquerque, “a weird and scary dude” who makes his living collecting rented carts from the airport and who cherishes his sick cat, Gilbert. When Gilbert requires an expensive operation, Grandpa suggests a scheme of stealing people’s luggage and the boy finds some friendly solace reading the diary of the owner (Maggie) of the backpack he swipes. The title story concerns a couple of road-trippers speeding across Kansas. They come upon a boy named Kyle, who has taught himself to surf, implausibly, in the cornfields. Provoking a shootout with the town cop on their way to take Kyle to the hospital to set his broken arm, the narrator and his on-again-off-again girlfriend learn the sad, hopeless story of Kyle’s sick sister, and the narrator seizes the “bleak revelation—Kyle would never get to the ocean.” Indeed, these characters are stuck for good where they are, like the members of the road gang, prisoners of Galloway Lake Detention Center, who make the lone, weak black man, Maurice, the butt of their vicious jokes. When Maurice’s own sorrow finally surfaces, the men explode in their anger and desperation and beat him horribly: “ . . . the madness of it brought great wild smiles to our faces.” The young narrator of “Elena,” looking for work, seeks “a good situation” across the border in Juarez helping coyotes enlist truck drivers to carry stowaways. The work turns ugly (how can he imagine otherwise?), and even the one redemptive note, his love for the teenage prostitute Elena, can’t alter the persistent corrosion of poverty and ignorance. Other stories are occasionally sophomoric in their handling, but, overall, Rothbart writes with control, precision and compassion.
A storyteller mastering his craft.Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-6305-7
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
A kind of Holden Caulfield who speaks bravely and winningly from inside the sorrows of autism: wonderful, simple, easy,...
Britisher Haddon debuts in the adult novel with the bittersweet tale of a 15-year-old autistic who’s also a math genius.
Christopher Boone has had some bad knocks: his mother has died (well, she went to the hospital and never came back), and soon after he found a neighbor’s dog on the front lawn, slain by a garden fork stuck through it. A teacher said that he should write something that he “would like to read himself”—and so he embarks on this book, a murder mystery that will reveal who killed Mrs. Shears’s dog. First off, though, is a night in jail for hitting the policeman who questions him about the dog (the cop made the mistake of grabbing the boy by the arm when he can’t stand to be touched—any more than he can stand the colors yellow or brown, or not knowing what’s going to happen next). Christopher’s father bails him out but forbids his doing any more “detecting” about the dog-murder. When Christopher disobeys (and writes about it in his book), a fight ensues and his father confiscates the book. In time, detective-Christopher finds it, along with certain other clues that reveal a very great deal indeed about his mother’s “death,” his father’s own part in it—and the murder of the dog. Calming himself by doing roots, cubes, prime numbers, and math problems in his head, Christopher runs away, braves a train-ride to London, and finds—his mother. How can this be? Read and see. Neither parent, if truth be told, is the least bit prepossessing or more than a cutout. Christopher, though, with pet rat Toby in his pocket and advanced “maths” in his head, is another matter indeed, and readers will cheer when, way precociously, he takes his A-level maths and does brilliantly.
A kind of Holden Caulfield who speaks bravely and winningly from inside the sorrows of autism: wonderful, simple, easy, moving, and likely to be a smash.Pub Date: June 17, 2003
ISBN: 0-385-50945-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2003
PLB 0-688-13166-2 King Midas And The Golden Touch ($16.00; PLB $15.63; Apr.; 32 pp.; 0-688-13165-4; PLB 0-688-13166-2): The familiar tale of King Midas gets the golden touch in the hands of Craft and Craft (Cupid and Psyche, 1996). The author takes her inspiration from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s retelling, capturing the essence of the tale with the use of pithy dialogue and colorful description. Enchanting in their own right, the illustrations summon the Middle Ages as a setting, and incorporate colors so lavish that when they are lost to the uniform gold spurred by King Midas’s touch, the point of the story is further burnished. (Picture book. 7-9)
Pub Date: April 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-688-13165-4
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1999
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