Caveats often accompany reviews of Cooper's work (Frisk, Wrong, etc.), and it's not hard to see why. His novels (including this one) depict a nasty, brutish kind of gay sex, shadowed by violence and exploitation, yet they also have an inescapable power. We're in California, though you'd never know it; nearly all the scenes are interiors. Ziggy McCauley is a dysfunctional 18- year-old who checks into his high school just long enough to see his therapist. When Ziggy was two he was adopted by two gay fathers. After a while Roger, the ``less evil'' one, split; the other, Brice, has been raping and beating up his son for years. Ziggy, bisexual and ``needy,'' has one friend, Calhoun, ``the only human being...who definitely gives a half-shit about him.'' The problem is that Calhoun is both straight and a heroin addict who likes to keep the world at a distance, so Ziggy must keep his expressions of love to a minimum while simultaneously dealing with Roger, who has flown in from New York for some hot sex. Another sinister influence is Ziggy's Uncle Ken, who makes porn videos starring young teens; when 13-year-old Robin OD's, Ken summons a necrophile and collects a finder's fee before burying the corpse. Here, Cooper goes over the top; more chilling is the moment when Roger and Brice snare Ziggy, befouled by vomit, spaced-out on heroin, and do ``every lascivious thing you can do to a putrid and comatose male.'' Though Cooper's adults are beyond redemption, his kids achieve a genuine pathos, for despite their best efforts they never stop feeling; at the end Ziggy and Calhoun snuggle up together like babes in the woods. There is no narrative momentum in what is essentially a tableau of victims and predators; even so, the power is there.
Pub Date: March 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-8021-1542-X
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1993
Lunge-Larsen and Preus debut with this story of a flower that blooms for the first time to commemorate the uncommon courage of a girl who saves her people from illness. The girl, an Ojibwe of the northern woodlands, knows she must journey to the next village to get the healing herb, mash-ki- ki, for her people, who have all fallen ill. After lining her moccasins with rabbit fur, she braves a raging snowstorm and crosses a dark frozen lake to reach the village. Then, rather than wait for morning, she sets out for home while the villagers sleep. When she loses her moccasins in the deep snow, her bare feet are cut by icy shards, and bleed with every step until she reaches her home. The next spring beautiful lady slippers bloom from the place where her moccasins were lost, and from every spot her injured feet touched. Drawing on Ojibwe sources, the authors of this fluid retelling have peppered the tale with native words and have used traditional elements, e.g., giving voice to the forces of nature. The accompanying watercolors, with flowing lines, jewel tones, and decorative motifs, give stately credence to the story’s iconic aspects. (Picture book/folklore. 4-8)
Pub Date: March 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-395-90512-5
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1999
Cussler's most adult, least comic-strip-y entry yet in the Dirk Pitt sea sagas. Gone is the outlandish plotting of Treasure (1988), when Dirk found Cleopatra's barge in Texas, and of Sahara (199), which unearthed Lincoln's body in a Confederate sub—buried in the desert sands. Now, in his 11th outing, Dirk Pitt and his National Underwater and Marine Agency (NUMA) fight villainous megalomaniac Arthur Dorsett, head of Dorsett Consolidated Mining, which holds the world's wealthiest diamond-mine empire. Pitt and his team must fight as well Dorsett's three daughters, the coldly beauteous Amazonian Boudicca, whose giant strength dwarfs Dirk's; the elegant but heartless Deirdre; and the star-crossed zoologist Maeve, whose bastard twins are held captive by grandfather Arthur so that Maeve will infiltrate NUMA and report on its investigation of his holdings—even though Dirk recently saved Maeve and Deirdre's lives in the Antarctic. First, however, Cussler takes us back to 1856 and a typhoon-battered British clipper ship, the Gladiator, that sinks in uncharted seas off Australia; only eight survive, including Jess Dorsett "the highwayman," a dandyish-looking convict, who discovers raw diamonds when stranded on an uninhabited island. From this arises the Dorsett empire, bent on undermining the world market in diamonds by dumping a colossal backlog of stones and colored gems into its vast chain of jewelry stores and, with one blow, toppling De Beers and all rivals. Worse, Arthur Dorsett excavates by high-energy-pulsed ultrasound, and when ultrasound from all four of his island mines (one on Gladiator Island, near New Zealand, another by Easter Island, the last two in the North Pacific Ocean) happen to converge, a killer shock wave destroys all marine and human life for 30 kilometers around, and now threatens over a million people in Hawaii—unless Dirk Pitt's aging body can hold it back. Tireless mechanical nomenclature, but furious storytelling.
Pub Date: Jan. 2, 1996
ISBN: 0-684-80297-X
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1995
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