by Debrah Williamson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 5, 2006
Pauly’s voice has some charm, but even 13-year-olds might find the story cloyingly innocent and optimistic.
A young girl deals with her parents’ death while driving with her aunt from Oklahoma to California in this work of spiritual uplift from romance novelist Williamson.
In 1955 Tulsa, Pauly is orphaned when her parents, manic-depressive Gracie and good-hearted but irresponsible Johnny, who is always moving the family to avoid paying the landlord, die in a rollercoaster accident. A tough-talking, precocious 13-year-old, Pauly feels guilty that she was angry at her parents moments before their deaths. She worries what will happen to her and her younger brother Buddy, a frail polio survivor who wears a leg brace. No one in the family wants to take them in until glamorous Aunt Nora shows up from Hollywood, where she’s supposedly been working as a movie extra. Aunt Nora has a big car and plenty of money. She offers to raise Pauly and Buddy and drives them back to California on what she calls “The Daring Adventure of Us,” a camping vacation/road trip. Although Pauly is suspicious at first, Aunt Nora wins her over with alacrity. Within a week, Pauly has adjusted to her parents’ deaths and is ready to accept Aunt Nora, who displays her generosity and upright morality in several incidents along the way. Soon there is another passenger. Tyb is a former ranch owner who has escaped from a retirement home with his dog Puppy. At first, Buddy’s friendship with Tyb threatens Pauly, but nothing in this story is ever too threatening. Even when Pauly and Nora are almost kidnapped and raped, the tone remains reassuringly comic. Once in California, Pauly’s biggest challenge comes when she discovers that Aunt Nora’s wealth is derived from real estate and realizes that landlords are not always the enemy.
Pauly’s voice has some charm, but even 13-year-olds might find the story cloyingly innocent and optimistic.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2006
ISBN: 0-451-21926-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: NAL/Berkley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2006
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by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
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SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
by Mark Z. Danielewski ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 6, 2000
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...
An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.
Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.Pub Date: March 6, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-70376-4
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000
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