Well-made, erudite, often witty short stories from an accomplished veteran of the form.
Trevor's (Girls I Know, 2013) second book of stories is nimble and smart—bookish in a mostly good way.
These characters, often academics, tend to be feeling hapless in middle age, and they crave life changes that their habits and mildness and shore-hugging aren't likely to allow—until Trevor puts them into collisions with big disruptive forces: a boyfriend who seems sprung from mythology ("Endymion"), an iconoclastic writer of experimental fiction ("The Novelist and the Short Story Writer"), the threat of exposure as an embezzler ("The Program in Profound Thought"). The satiric elements in these stories, especially toward their beginnings, can be a bit easy and overbroad, but by taking his characters' emotional plights with utmost seriousness even as he lampoons their circumstances, Trevor manages again and again to steer the stories into deeper, weirder, more fascinating waters. In "The Detroit Frankfurt School Discussion Group," for example, Colin, a recently divorced sad-sack adjunct instructor in English, having failed to reorder his life through golf, Thai cooking, learning Russian, strong drink, internet dating, and so on, is kidnapped off the street and driven to an abandoned, rat-ridden book depository in the wrecked inner city, where his charge is to explain by candlelight how German critical theory can help fix Detroit. Trevor ingeniously stretches the thin filament of this conceit, and by the end it's become a surprising and even poignant small-scale novel of ideas featuring two formidable characters: the resurgent Colin and his charismatic abductor, a drug dealer–turned-philosopher named Ty.
Well-made, erudite, often witty short stories from an accomplished veteran of the form.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9848245-5-7
Page Count: 267
Publisher: SixOneSeven Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 7, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Refreshingly filled with love rather than sex, this coming-of-age novel examines the human cost of political repression.
A star-crossed romance captures the turmoil of pre-revolutionary Iran in Seraji’s debut.
From the rooftops of Tehran in 1973, life looks pretty good to 17-year-old Pasha Shahed and his friend Ahmed. They’re bright, funny and good-looking; they’re going to graduate from high school in a year; and they’re in love with a couple of the neighborhood girls. But all is not idyllic. At first the girls scarcely know the boys are alive, and one of them, Zari, is engaged to Doctor—not actually a doctor but an exceptionally gifted and politically committed young Iranian. In this neighborhood, the Shah is a subject of contempt rather than veneration, and residents fear SAVAK, the state’s secret police force, which operates without any restraint. Pasha, the novel’s narrator and prime dreamer, focuses on two key periods in his life: the summer and fall of 1973, when his life is going rather well, and the winter of 1974, when he’s incarcerated in a grim psychiatric hospital. Among the traumatic events he relates are the sudden arrest, imprisonment and presumed execution of Doctor. Pasha feels terrible because he fears he might have inadvertently been responsible for SAVAK having located Doctor’s hiding place; he also feels guilty because he’s always been in love with Zari. She makes a dramatic political statement, setting herself on fire and sending Pasha into emotional turmoil. He is both devastated and further worried when the irrepressible Ahmed also seems to come under suspicion for political activity. Pasha turns bitterly against religion, raising the question of God’s existence in a world in which the bad guys seem so obviously in the ascendant. Yet the badly scarred Zari assures him, “Things will change—they always do.”
Refreshingly filled with love rather than sex, this coming-of-age novel examines the human cost of political repression.Pub Date: May 5, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-451-22681-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: NAL/Berkley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2009
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
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