A bit diffuse and too reliant on coincidence, but also often poignant and funny, especially about the self-destructive fools...
Dorst’s appealing debut features rookie cop Mike Mercer patrolling Colma, Calif., famed cemetery city in which the dead outnumber the living by a thousand to one.
Shortly after he joins the force, Mercer discovers a teen victimized by a vicious prank: drugged, stripped from the waist down, duct-taped and stashed headfirst in a burial chamber. This is Jude DiMaio, well-meaning but impetuous son of a film director, and his story gets entwined with that of Mercer, whose romantic missteps are in many ways parallel. Other principals are Mercer’s girlfriend, Fiona, a nurse many years his elder, and her potential rival, Kelly, a fun-loving journalist; Mercer’s partner, Nick Toronto, behind whose barbed wit and aggressive façade lurks a softie; and a group of Mercer’s privileged high-school friends, all groping bit by bit, as Mike is, toward maturity. Dorst nimbly juggles multiple plot lines and a complicated cast, and his account of the banter and brotherhood of cops rings true. Where the novel gets into trouble is in the daring subplot that might have been its triumph: Mercer gradually becomes aware that his predecessor, Officer Featherstone, had been waging a stealth campaign against—well, against a gang of hooligan ghosts who are terrorizing the other corpses. In Colma, whether he wants it or not, a peace officer turns out to have jurisdiction, too, over those who ought to be resting in peace rather than disturbing it. This gang of the undead commits acts of mayhem, but it’s hard to take these acts seriously, given that the wounds they inflict mostly heal overnight and that Dorst often plays their antics for laughs. Ultimately, despite its promise, this story line seems mostly a sideshow, overshadowed by the coming-of-age plot.
A bit diffuse and too reliant on coincidence, but also often poignant and funny, especially about the self-destructive fools that love makes us. Dorst is a talent to watch.Pub Date: July 3, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-59448-987-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
In this vivid and moving book, Orange articulates the challenges and complexities not only of Native Americans, but also of...
Orange’s debut novel offers a kaleidoscopic look at Native American life in Oakland, California, through the experiences and perspectives of 12 characters.
An aspiring documentary filmmaker, a young man who has taught himself traditional dance by watching YouTube, another lost in the bulk of his enormous body—these are just a few of the point-of-view characters in this astonishingly wide-ranging book, which culminates with an event called the Big Oakland Powwow. Orange, who grew up in the East Bay and is an enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma, knows the territory, but this is no work of social anthropology; rather, it is a deep dive into the fractured diaspora of a community that remains, in many ways, invisible to many outside of it. “We made powwows because we needed a place to be together,” he writes. “Something intertribal, something old, something to make us money, something we could work toward, for our jewelry, our songs, our dances, our drum.” The plot of the book is almost impossible to encapsulate, but that’s part of its power. At the same time, the narrative moves forward with propulsive force. The stakes are high: For Jacquie Red Feather, on her way to meet her three grandsons for the first time, there is nothing as conditional as sobriety: “She was sober again,” Orange tells us, “and ten days is the same as a year when you want to drink all the time.” For Daniel Gonzales, creating plastic guns on a 3-D printer, the only lifeline is his dead brother, Manny, to whom he writes at a ghostly Gmail account. In its portrayal of so-called “Urban Indians,” the novel recalls David Treuer’s The Hiawatha, but the range, the vision, is all its own. What Orange is saying is that, like all people, Native Americans don’t share a single identity; theirs is a multifaceted landscape, made more so by the sins, the weight, of history. That some of these sins belong to the characters alone should go without saying, a point Orange makes explicit in the novel’s stunning, brutal denouement. “People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them,” James Baldwin wrote in a line Orange borrows as an epigraph to one of the book’s sections; this is the inescapable fate of every individual here.
In this vivid and moving book, Orange articulates the challenges and complexities not only of Native Americans, but also of America itself.Pub Date: June 5, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-52037-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
A quiet tale that considers the way small, human connections can disrupt the callous powers of authority.
A novelist tries to adapt to her ever changing reality as her world slowly disappears.
Renowned Japanese author Ogawa (Revenge, 2013, etc.) opens her latest novel with what at first sounds like a sinister fairy tale told by a nameless mother to a nameless daughter: “Long ago, before you were born, there were many more things here…transparent things, fragrant things…fluttery ones, bright ones….It’s a shame that the people who live here haven’t been able to hold such marvelous things in their hearts and minds, but that’s just the way it is on this island.” But rather than a twisted bedtime story, this depiction captures the realities of life on the narrator's unnamed island. The small population awakens some mornings with all knowledge of objects as mundane as stamps, valuable as emeralds, omnipresent as birds, or delightful as roses missing from their minds. They then proceed to discard all physical traces of the idea that has disappeared—often burning the lifeless ones and releasing the natural ones to the elements. The authoritarian Memory Police oversee this process of loss and elimination. Viewing “anything that fails to vanish when they say it should [as] inconceivable,” they drop into homes for inspections, seizing objects and rounding up anyone who refuses—or is simply unable—to follow the rules. Although, at the outset, the plot feels quite Orwellian, Ogawa employs a quiet, poetic prose to capture the diverse (and often unexpected) emotions of the people left behind rather than of those tormented and imprisoned by brutal authorities. Small acts of rebellion—as modest as a birthday party—do not come out of a commitment to a greater cause but instead originate from her characters’ kinship with one another. Technical details about the disappearances remain intentionally vague. The author instead stays close to her protagonist’s emotions and the disorientation she and her neighbors struggle with each day. Passages from the narrator’s developing novel also offer fascinating glimpses into the way the changing world affects her unconscious mind.
A quiet tale that considers the way small, human connections can disrupt the callous powers of authority.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-101-87060-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2019
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