ME BANDY, YOU CISSIE: The Journals of Bartholomew Bandy

by Donald Jack ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 17, 1979

Fourth volume in the misadventures of Canada's WW I flying ace Bartholomew Bandy, who now enters the Roaring Twenties in Manhattan, complete with his tedious jocularity and slipshod English ("". . . this is an unworthy slander based on envy, frustration, apoplectic fury, keen insight, and similar deficiency""). The dashing young Bandy meets Cissie Chaffington, 20, on board a ship bound from Southampton to the States--she's six-foot-two, bustless and waistless, overwhelmingly shy, but at last invites Bandy to deflower her. Back in Ottawa he meets her father (a zillionaire publisher who collects German castles and has them shipped to his Xanadu in California) and wrecks his first commercial-aviation plane near Cissie's big house at Great Neck, where her mother is decrying Fitzgerald's awful book about petting parties and lounge lizards. And, in fact, a shady bootlegger who lives nearby (and seems much like Jay Gatsby) involves Bandy in a still shadier deal assembling a Vickers Vimy heavy bomber for an aerial bus company. And so it reels on, with Bandy winding up as a silent movie aviator while being pursued by a beautiful Russian ex-revolutionary. Unfocused silliness, with the would-be Bandy wit at its most labored--so only for diehard fans of the previous three volumes.

Pub Date: Aug. 17, 1979

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1979

Categories: FICTION