A supernatural tale with a strong, engaging protagonist.
In Rosengard’s new-adult debut novel, a college student searches for the person responsible for her best friend’s death—with a little help from a familiar ghost.
Nineteen-year-old Callie McCayter escapes a gloomy life in Houston by attending Astoria College in the Pacific Northwest. She’s rooming with childhood friend Izzy Miller, whose parents took Callie in when it became clear her alcoholic father, a cop, was abusing her. But tragedy strikes during the friends’ sophomore year: Izzy is killed by a car in a hit-and-run as she’s walking home from a party in the middle of the night. Callie’s resultant despair causes her to miss numerous classes, and she may lose her scholarships, as a result. Then, one day, she sees the ghost of Izzy in their room. Her late friend doesn’t speak but instead uses lipstick to write a message on a mirror: “HELP ME.” Callie becomes determined to solve the mystery of what happened the night of Izzy’s death; she not only wants to find out the identity of the unknown driver, but also who’s to blame for the fact that Izzy was walking alone on a dark road. This entails interrogating four students who showed up to the party with Izzy and who apparently didn’t care that she was uncharacteristically drunk. Meanwhile, Callie, who normally abstains from dating, becomes attracted to two very different guys—seemingly meek Colin Turner and 20-something campus security officer Jay Houghten, an ex-Marine. Soon, she starts to experience Izzy’s memories, and, as a result, she starts to uncover quite a few secrets. Rosengard thoroughly develops her paranormal mystery plot, but the heart of the tale is Callie’s growing fortitude. She’s initially despondent after Izzy dies, but she eventually becomes determined to pinpoint every important detail of that fateful night. As the story progresses, readers learn of Callie’s other strengths, including her training in self-defense, stemming from her experiences with her dad. Much of the narrative centers on the aforementioned romantic triangle; both of the young men are enticing but flawed, making Callie’s choice understandably difficult. But they also have ties to the greater mystery—and they may be withholding important information from Callie about the party. Izzy’s ghostly appearances are sporadic and cryptic enough that Callie is left to unravel the whodunit mostly on her own. However, Callie’s memory-visions of Izzy’s experiences add a startling element, as they reveal a less-than-pleasant side of her friend. In one memory, for example, Izzy is irate when her mother gives Callie special attention. The mystery contains a handful of other shocking twists, although many readers will likely see a few of them coming. However, the author’s grasp of Callie’s first-person voice is sensational: The teenager endlessly debates with herself and harps on her own shortcomings, such as her tendency to distance herself from potential friends and romantic interests. She does acknowledge and work on overcoming her weaknesses, though—and readers will definitely see her virtues even when she doesn’t.
A supernatural tale with a strong, engaging protagonist.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5380-9012-1
Page Count: 510
Publisher: Horseshoes & Hand Grenades Publishing, LLC
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
If the elusive Pynchon regularly cranked out novels, then this latest addition to his semi-classic oeuvre would be considered an excellent, if flawed, fiction, not as demanding and complex as Gravity's Rainbow, nor as neat and clever as The Crying of Lot 49 and V. As it is, coming 17 years since the last book, it's something of a disappointment.
Yes, it's compulsively funny, full of virtuoso riffs, and trenchant in its anarcho-libertarian social commentary. But there's a missing dimension in this tale of post-Sixties malaise—a sense of characters being more than an accumulation of goofy allusions and weird behavior. And all of its winding, conspiratorially digressive plot adds up to a final moment of apparently unintentional kitsch—a limp scene reuniting a girl and her dog. Built on flashbacks to the 60's, the story reenacts in 1984 the struggles that refuse to disappear. Not politics really, but the sense of solidarity and betrayal that marks both periods for the numerous characters that wander into this fictional vortex. At the center is Frenesi (Free and Easy) Gates, who's anything but. A red-diaper baby and radical film-maker during the rebellion-charged 60's, Frenesi sold her soul to a man in uniform, the quintessential Nixon-Reagan fascist, Brock Vond, a fed whose manic pursuit of lefties and dopers finds him abusing civil rights over three decades. He's motivated not just by innate evil, but by his obsession with Frenesi, whom he sets up as a sting-operation expert protected under the Witness Protection Program. Meanwhile, the venomous Vond sees to it that Frenesi's hippie husband, Zoyd Wheeler, and her daughter, Prairie, are "disappeared" to Vineland, the northern California town where L.A. counterculturalists lick their collective wounds among the redwoods, and bemoan "the heartless power of the scabland garrison state the green free America of their childhoods even then was turning into." Brilliant digressions on Californian left-wing history, the saga of The People's Republic of Rock and Roll, a Mob wedding, and the living dead known as the Thanatoids all come bathed in the clarity of Pynchon's eye-popping language.
Pynchon's latest should prove to the legions of contemporary scribbler-fakers that it isn't enough to reproduce pop-schlock on the page, it needs to be siphoned through the kind of imaginative genius on display everywhere here.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1990
ISBN: 0141180633
Page Count: 385
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1990
PERSPECTIVES
Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
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