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AMATEURS

Name: AMATEURS
Author: Dylan Hicks
ISBN: 978-1-56689-432-6

by Dylan Hicks ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 3, 2016

Felicitous characters and a scrumptious plot make Hicks’ second novel refreshing and fun.

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The personal and social lives of a group of friends are on display in this modern novel of manners.

Hicks’ second novel, after Boarded Windows (2012), is smart, witty, and endearing. In a brief prologue, dated April 1972, we meet the Crennel family. Marion, a daughter, has written an unfinished novel that was “meant to be a parody and refraction of the kind of nuptial denouement one finds in Shakespeare or Austen.” (Sounds a lot like Hicks’ own novel.) She hides it in the attic. Then Part 1, titled "Prenuptial," begins in May 2011. The novel is divided into months over 11 years. Episodes go back and forth in time. We meet characters in one episode and then jump a few years ahead in the next episode to see them now older, maybe wiser. New characters, mostly minor, pop up along the way, and gradually, all the characters are jumping back and forth in time, slowly moving toward Part 2, "Postnuptial," with the last episode set in September 2011. It’s very much a modern Austen-esque novel of manners. Carefully plotted, it’s jumpy at first, but once settled in, the story takes off, providing a clever, jaunty ride. In May 2011, we first meet Karyn and her young son, Maxwell. She’s been invited to her cousin Archer Bondarenko’s wedding to Gemma in June. His family makes dildos, and they’re plenty rich. He’s published a successful novel which he may or may not have written. In August 2004, we meet Sara Crennel, a burgeoning writer; she’s with Lucas Pope, who was previously with Gemma. Sara may or may not have written Archer’s novel. Scandal ensues. A handy score card of who what when helps keep track of everyone in this sprightly tale about friendship and courtship, money, love, assorted complications—and writers.

Felicitous characters and a scrumptious plot make Hicks’ second novel refreshing and fun.

Pub Date: May 3, 2016

ISBN: 978-1-56689-432-6

Page Count: 280

Publisher: Coffee House

Review Posted Online: Feb. 14, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2016

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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PLAYER PIANO

A NOVEL

by Kurt Vonnegut ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 18, 1952

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A tough, tightly written book of a brave new world to come, which in its projection offers a tantalizing problem as well as an imaginative invention reminiscent of the early Huxley. Dr. Paul Proteus, a super engineer in a super-mechanized society, finds his life lacking in significance although he is on the eve of a spectacular promotion as the manager of the Pittsburgh works. Urged on by his sterile wife, he nonetheless finds himself listening to his iconoclastic friend Finnerty. The two spend a drunken and revealing evening among the reeks and wrecks (the common people) where they meet Lasher, a self-styled preacher who converts Finnerty and jells his resolve to break the system. Dr. Proteus wavers in a divided loyalty but when the Pittsburgh job is offered him only at the price of his betrayal of Finnerty, his Protean change is completed and he joins forces with the opposition...The automatic checker player that is beaten when crossed wires overheat it, a talking helicopter, a monstrous machine with a tape recorder memory, all these absurdly ingenious machines give the book its special quality and fascination. And this new performance on the player piano of western civilization is worthy of more thoughtful attention.

Pub Date: Aug. 18, 1952

ISBN: 0385333781

Page Count: 340

Publisher: Scribner

Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1952

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
LOVE, KURT
by Kurt Vonnegut ; edited by Edith Vonnegut

- BOOK REVIEW
PITY THE READER
by Kurt Vonnegut & Suzanne McConnell

- BOOK REVIEW
COMPLETE STORIES
by Kurt Vonnegut ; edited by Jerome Klinkowitz ; Dan Wakefield

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THE GIFTED SCHOOL

by Bruce Holsinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 2, 2019

The subject of parents charging past every ethical restraint in pursuit of crème de la crème education could not be more...

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Four close friends, their husbands, their children, their housecleaners—and one application-only magnet school that will drive them all over the brink.

A Boulder-esque town in the Front Range of the Rockies, Crystal, Colorado, is a progressive paradise where four entwined families are raising their children, though death, divorce, and drugs have taken their toll on the group since the moms met at baby swim class years back. The women give each other mugs with friendship quotes each year on the anniversary of that meeting, and they get together every Friday morning for a 4-mile run, "a ritual carved into the flinty stone of their lives…shared since they'd first started trimming up again after the births of their children." Beneath the surface, resentments are already simmering—one family is far wealthier than the others; the widowed mom is a neurotic mess; one of the couples didn't make it through elementary school and he's remarried to "a hot young au pair who was great with the twins [and] a willing partner in mindblowing carnality." Then comes the announcement of a public magnet school for exceptional learners, with a standardized test as the first step in separating the wheat from the chaff. The novel's depiction of the ensuing devolution is grounded in acute social observation—class, race, privilege, woke and libertarian politics—then hits the mark on the details as well. From the bellowing of the dads on the soccer field to the oversharing in the teenager's vlog, down to the names of the kids themselves—twins Aidan and Charlie Unsworth-Chaudhury; best friends Emma Z and Emma Q; nerdy chessmaster Xander Frye—Holsinger's (The Invention of Fire, 2015) pitch is close to perfect.

The subject of parents charging past every ethical restraint in pursuit of crème de la crème education could not be more timely, and the Big Little Lies treatment creates a deliciously repulsive and eerily current page-turner.