A young British woman watches her life unravel after a risky sexual encounter with an ex-con.
It’s lust at first sight for the unnamed narrator of this unsettling novel, who just can’t help herself when a hunky, fresh-out-of-prison claimant enters the benefits office where she works. The two end up having a quickie in the parking garage, an unprecedented act that triggers something self-destructive in her. She tracks him down afterwards, and they embark on a highly dysfunctional affair characterized by his cruelty and her degradation. There are thrills to be had as well, but her obsession drowns out every other relationship in her life. Her loving parents and loyal best friend Allison try to snap her out of it, but it is no use. She slacks off at her job, makes a fool of herself on a blind date with a decent bloke and generally does everything she can to distance herself from the solid middle-class world she came from. Fitfully aware of the toxicity of her relationship (he disappears for weeks with her car, disrupts her grandmother’s funeral reception), the girl makes some feeble attempts at a normal life. The ironic titles of each chapter read like daily affirmations suggested in a self-help book, and inject a creepy humor into the increasingly bleak proceedings. Her internal struggle over Mr. Wrong seems to jeopardize her very sanity. Naturally, something has to give, and although both reader and heroine know it will end badly, the shocking finish still comes as a surprise. With a distinctive, cliché-free writing style and a psychologically complex “victim,” this first novel from talented, award-winning Welsh writer Davies (Grace, Tamar and Lazlo the Beautiful, 2009) points to a promising future.
Darkly sardonic exploration of sexual obsession.
Pub Date: July 12, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-86547-854-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Faber & Faber/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 6, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2011
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
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
