A light-hearted celebration of things uncool.
Australian TV writer Knight, a founder of comedy troupe The Chaser, abandons hard satire for softer emotions in his affectionate debut about a beta male finding his way.
Some youths rush headlong into adulthood, but Paul Johnson, 25, is determined to drag his feet. After graduating from law school (to the delight of his hipster parents), Paul chooses another path in life more from apathy than resolution. He makes his living as a DJ in and around Sydney, flogging wedding parties with the most cringe-inducing pop standards. “My skills wouldn’t have helped me in a pumping superclub on the fair island of Ibiza, but…give me two CD players and a box of greatest hits compilations, and I could pump up the jam, pump it up, while your feet are stomping,” says Paul. He genuinely loves music and has a talent for making it. But he’s starting to experience the embarrassment of an elongated adolescence, largely due to mockery from his good mate Nige and his best friend, the elusive and lovely Zoë. The sexual politics are lad-lit as usual: Paul beds a young companion mostly to aggravate her obnoxious older brother while he pines away for Felicity, a fellow attorney. “I was stuck, as New Order would have put it, in a bizarre love triangle—and one set to a tacky soundtrack,” Paul admits. But it’s the soundtrack and sincerity that sets the book apart from more acerbic fare like Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity. We love what we love, no matter how cheesy the objects of our affections. The story might be a little syrupy here and there, but it mostly hums along as a comic novel.
A light-hearted celebration of things uncool.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-74166-626-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Bantam UK/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
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