Distinctly odd, but despite its flaws, there’s a touch of magic here.
Santa Claus, trolls, reindeer, a magic fish, and other characters have Scandinavian adventures in this illustrated children’s book.
A Laplander troll named Gorgi takes Santa’s reindeer to their winter pasturage via the Trans-Siberian Railway. Although some trolls are gigantic, Gorgi is only turnip-sized; nevertheless, he bravely attacks five angry Russian bears trying to stop the train, even biting one bear’s toe off. The reindeer arrive at Lake Baikal, where Gorgi goes fishing. He hooks a beautiful, magic fish, which heals the bear and later turns into an oven that provides a wonderful holiday dinner that even includes Christmas cookies. The smell attracts Santa, who’s traveling nearby; he stuffs himself and then falls asleep. Upon waking, he notices that his bag of toys is missing. Gorgi discovers that the sack has been taken to an impenetrable cave belonging to Gunlord, a huge, gawky giantess who’s “really a squealy little girl.” To lure Gunlord out, Gorgi’s mother dresses up as a traveling beautician named Miss Helena Rubinstern and offers her a free makeover. Not only does Gunlord become outwardly pretty, she also offers to help Santa and sings Christmas carols. Finally, Gunlord, Gorgi, and Santa help to rescue a tiny reindeer stuck in an ice crevasse; Gunlord sings him a soothing lullaby. Holley (Tangled Tales 2, 2017, etc.) plunges readers into a Christmas fever dream, mixing up figures from legend with modern creations, such as Clement Clarke Moore’s reindeer. The story transitions abruptly from one emotional register to another—fear, celebration, disgust, humor—and leaves off at a seemingly random moment. How the injured bear suddenly acquires a name (“Griselda”) and shows up at Lake Baikal and why Gorgi becomes sympathetic to her remain unexplained. Some allusions will probably be lost on younger readers, such as “the bears in Stravinsky’s FIREBIRD” or the play on cosmetics mogul Helena Rubinstein’s name. Although the beautician scheme is amusing, it’s a shame that Holley makes such a direct link between beauty and good character. These matters aside, the story has wit, energy, child-friendly silliness, and vivid images in Holley’s color-washed, lively illustrations.
Distinctly odd, but despite its flaws, there’s a touch of magic here.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5403-5867-7
Page Count: 21
Publisher: White Barn Press
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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